Ask HN: How do robotics teams manage data and debugging today?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
* Combing through the syslogs to find issues is an absolute nightmare, even more so if you are told that the machine broke at some point last night
* Even if you find the error, it's not necessarily when something broke; it could have happened way before, but you just discovered it because the system hit a state that required it
* If combing through syslog is hard, try rummaging through multiple mcap files by hand to see where a fault happened
* The hardware failing silently is a big PITA - this is especially true for things that read analog signals (think PLCs)
Many of the above issues can be solved with the right architecture or tooling, but often the teams I joined didn't have it, and lacked the capacity to develop it.
At Foxglove, we make it easy to aggregate and visualize the data and have some helper features (e.g., events, data loaders) that can speed up workflows. However, I would say that having good architecture, procedures, and an aligned team goes a long way in smoothing out troubleshooting, regardless of the tools.
• Correlates syslogs with mcap/bag file anomalies automatically
• Flags when a hardware failure might have begun (not just when it manifests)
• Surfaces probable root causes instead of leaving teams to manually chase timestamps
From your experience across 50+ clients, which do you think is the bigger timesink: data triage across multiple logs/files or interpreting what the signals actually mean once you’ve found them?
Maybe there could be value in signal interpretation for purely software engineers but I reckon it would be hard for such team to build robots.
Do you think there are specific triage workflows where even a small automation (say, correlating error timestamps across syslog and bag files) would save meaningful time?
* I was setting up Ouster lidar to use gos time, don’t remember the details now but it was reporting the time ~32 seconds in the past (probably some leap seconds setting?)
* I had a ROS node misbehaving in some weird ways - it turned out there was a service call to insert something into db and for some reason the db started taking 5+ minutes to complete which wasn’t really appropriate for a blocking call
I think the timing is one thing that needs to be consistently done right on every platform. The other issues I came across were very application specific.
* Start with user-determined or auto-deduced invariants from "nominal" runs (e.g., "joint torque variance should never exceed 10% during unloaded motion," derived from historical MCAP bags). This takes inspiration from model-based verification techniques in current ROS2 research, e.g., automated formal verification with model driven engineering.
* use light, edge-optimized models (e.g., graph neural networks or variational autoencoders) to monitor ROS topic multivariate time series (/odom, /imu, /camera/image_raw). Fuse visual and sensor input using multimodal LLMs (fine-tuned on e.g. nuScenes or custom robot logs) to detect "silent failures" e.g., detect a LiDAR occlusion not reflected in logs but apparent from point cloud entropy spikes cross-checked against camera frames.
* Utilize GenAI (e.g., versions of GPT-4o or Llama) for NLP on logs, classifying ambiguous events like "nav stack increased latency" as a predictor for failure. This predictive approach is an improvement of the ROS Help Desk's GenAI model that already demonstrates 70-80% decrease in debugging time by indicating issues before full failure.
This is not hypothesizing; there are already PyTorch and ROS2 plugin prototype versions with ~90% accuracy detection in Gazebo simulation failures, and dynamic covariance compensation (as used in more recent AI-facilitated ROS2 localization studies) takes care of noisy real-world data.
The detection pipeline that is automatic will be akin to where the system receives live streams or bag files via a ROS2-compatible middleware (e.g., based on more recent flexible integration layers for task orchestration), then processes in streaming fashion then:
* map heterogeneous formats (MCAP, OpenLABEL, JSON logs) to a temporal knowledge graph nodes for components (sensors, planners), edges for causal dependencies and timestamps. Enables holistic analysis, as opposed to fragmented tools.
* Route the data through Apache Flink or Kafka combined ML pipelines for windowed detection. For instance, flag a "error" if a robot's velocity profile is beyond predicted physics models (with Control or PySDF libraries), even without explicit logs—combining environmental context from combined BIM/APS for vision use.
* subsequently employ uncertainty sampling through large language models to solicit user input on borderline scenarios, progressively fine‑tuning the models. Benchmark outcomes from SYSDIAGBENCH indicate that LLMs such as GPT‑4 perform exceptionally well, correctly identifying robotic problems in 85 % of cases across various model scales.
I trust this provides some insight; we are currently testing a prototype that fuses these components into a real‑time observability framework for ROS2. Although still in its infancy, it already demonstrates encouraging accuracy on both simulated and real‑world data sets. I would appreciate your thoughts on sharpening the notion of “error” for multi‑agent or hybrid systems, particularly in contexts where emergent behavior makes it hard to distinguish between anomalies and adaptive responses.