I’m supposed to write a “RobotLife vs Foxglove” article… But there is no battle here. Because Foxglove is amazing. At Ascento we used it all the time to see what the robot saw right before crashing into an obstacle. Automatically uploading bags of raw and processed telemetry data, register fall-events to quickly jump to interesting times, creating api-connections to link internal tooling with Foxglove information. It’s a glorious tool, which I believe every engineering team should give a try.
Foxglove
Foxglove is simply the best tool to figure out “what the heck happened to my robot?”. Its core is:
- Centralized (or decentralized) sensor data collection
- All the visualizations you could ever wish for… 3d models, all the types of video, graphs, pointclouds, scenes. 🤯
- Data management, imports, timelines, events, calendars, recordings.
You would use Foxglove for:
- Debugging
- Incident investigations
- Error gathering
RobotLife
RobotLife is the best tool for answering the broader question: “What is going on with my fleet?”. At RobotLife, we focus on the broader functional picture of all robots as a group. This includes:
- Preserving robot history, understanding the present and organizing the future.
- Coordinating people to install, ship and fix robots to fulfill customer agreements.
- Streamlining communication about robots between literally all people involved in getting robots out there.
You would use RobotLife for:
- Coordinating shipments
- Tracking progress on repairs
- Understanding where robots often break
- Staying in contact with clients
What RobotLife and Foxglove have in common
Two very different tools indeed, but there are some things that we share!
We both target only robotics. Robots and organizations that build&support robots have such specific needs, that generic tools just don’t cut it. So both Foxglove and RobotLife only try to solve problems for robot companies. That focus makes it possible to tailor the experience so that you get exactly what you need (and spoiler: you also get stuff that you don’t know yet you could use 😉)
Foxglove’s visualizations, customization and integrations are extremely powerful. With great power comes great complexity, and they did a pretty good job designing UX that makes the whole thing approachable. That’s also what RobotLife does: RobotLife offers a crazy amount of customizability and powertools for many different kinds of robot-service companies, and has a super simple basic outline. You can just get started with a simple default setup, and customize as needed while you grow.
Cheers!
Foxglove is the tool I wished that existed when I was debugging autonomous racecars at Formula Student Team Delft, and 6 years later it was out and about. RobotLife is the tool I wished that existed when I was scaling fleets at Ascento. And only 2 years later, the first version is live. Can’t wait to see what RobotLife will be in 4 more years!