Jupyter Notebooks are a powerful interactive data analysis tool. We’ve made it easy to load, analyze, and transform your Foxglove Data Platform data with notebooks so you can gain additional insights into your robotics data.

Our sample Jupyter Notebook walks through loading data and performing a few basic operations to showcase some workflows. With the help of data analysis libraries like pandas, opencv, and matplotlib, you can write custom transformations to explore and experiment with your data.

matplotlib plot

Open the sample notebook locally or online.

Open In Colab

Binder

Jupyter Notebooks are just one of many ways you can leverage Foxglove Data Platform to analyze your data. We’ll continue to expand on Foxglove Data Platform to support a growing set of use cases to accelerate your robotics development.

Contact us to start storing and analyzing your own robotics data in a Foxglove Data Platform. If you have any questions about getting set up, you can reach out to us for a product demo or join our Slack community for questions and support.


When we talk about Foxglove Studio for visualizing your robotics data, we often envision troubleshooting a fully fledged robot – maybe something with a motor, wheels or rotating arms, and a variety of cameras, radar, and LIDAR sensors.

While this may be the case for many Foxglove Studio users, Studio can also help you visualize data earlier in your development process – long before you have a working robotics stack or an assembled robot.

To demonstrate this, let’s cover one of our lesser-known data sources in Foxglove Studio – the Velodyne LIDAR connection.

What is Velodyne LIDAR?

As a San Jose-based LIDAR technology company, Velodyne LIDAR develops sensors for the field’s leading robotics companies, for applications as wide-ranging as autonomous vehicles, mobile mapping, and delivery drones. These state-of-the-art sensors are directly responsible for bringing robotics technology into more visible arenas of our lives. Industry giants like NVIDIA, Clearpath Robotics, and Postmates are leveraging LIDAR technology to monitor traffic, streamline construction, and automate food delivery.

As ubiquitous as Velodyne LIDAR technology has become, it’s no surprise that many Foxglove Studio users are using these sensors on their robots to collect spatial data. If you want to get visual feedback on your sensor data before troubleshooting the rest of your robot, you can use Foxglove Studio to calibrate your hardware – even before you have a properly functioning robotics stack.

Connecting to your Velodyne hardware

To visualize data coming into your Velodyne LIDAR sensor, you’ll first need to connect your sensor to a local network with an Ethernet cable (often included in your Velodyne shipment). I'll be using the Puck sensor, but Studio supports visualizing data from any Velodyne LIDAR sensor.

Connected sensor

You can confirm everything is connected properly by visiting the Velodyne IP address in a browser (in our case, 192.168.2.201). From here, you can use the available web GUI to make sure your computer is on the same subnet as the Velodyne sensor.

Sensor IP information

The Velodyne IP address may be statically assigned or assigned from DHCP, depending on the sensor’s configuration. Consult the Velodyne manual for more information on the networking setup.

Visualizing your LIDAR data in Foxglove Studio

The sensor communicates by broadcasting UDP packets to 255.255.255.255 on port 2369 by default. To visualize this data, you’ll need to open the Foxglove Studio desktop app and “Open connection”:

Opening a connection in Foxglove Studio

From there, select the Velodyne LIDAR option. You’ll be prompted for a UDP port – unless you’ve previously changed the sensor’s UDP port yourself, you can leave the default value at 2369.

Setting the connection's UDP port in Foxglove Studio

Click “Open”. You shouldn’t see any changes yet. Add a 3D panel to your layout, and then open the topic picker to toggle on your LIDAR scan topic /velodyne\_points.

3D panel output

From there, you should start to see your sensor data displayed in your 3D panel! Move your sensor around to view different parts of your environment – see if you can identify what LIDAR returns correspond to what real-life obstacles.

Visualizing support for every stage of development

Whether they’re making cities smarter, people safer, or workplaces more efficient, Velodyne LIDAR’s state-of-the-art sensors have set the industry standard for collecting rich spatial data. If you’ve decided to integrate them into your own robotics build, we want you to be able to use Foxglove Studio to visualize their data.

Studio provides you with the building blocks to compose your own tools – no matter the workflow you’re tackling, the amount of data you have, or the stage of development you’re in. If you have a mature robotics build with multiple actuators, sensors, and other bells and whistles, you can build a complex layout to debug each level of your robotics stack. But if your robot is currently nothing more than a sensor mounted on some wheels, Studio can still help you get started. Open up that Velodyne LIDAR connection, and see the world as your robot does.


The robotics industry is at an inflection point in its history. Whereas robots up until now have been deployed mostly in controlled environments like factories and assembly lines, we’re now reaching a stage where advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision are helping robots evolve past obedient drones.

Robots today can navigate cities and explore the ocean, mow lawns, and even perform surgery. They’re able to extract meaningful patterns out of previously unfathomable pixels; they’re able to improve themselves. They make dozens of invisible complex decisions in the blink of an eye – detecting targets, predicting futures, and planning next steps.

So how will our day-to-day lives look past this inflection point, when robotics permeates more areas of our lives? What are the biggest remaining challenges we have yet to tackle, and what are the possible upsides we have yet to enjoy?

A brief history of industrial revolutions

To understand how robotics will revolutionize our world, let’s first explore how previous industrial revolutions have redefined our lives and rewritten our political and economic destinies.

Often characterized as the farm-to-factory revolution, the 18th century’s First Industrial Revolution took the benefits of the Agricultural Revolution to pave the way towards large-scale industry. The population had boomed due to improved farming techniques, and the increased privatization of land motivated many to migrate en masse to cities in search of work. Factories and mines drew from this growing workforce to mine new power sources like coal, and invented new machines like the steam engine to mechanize huge swaths of production in industries like textile manufacturing.

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First Industrial Revolution

A century later, the Second Industrial Revolution focused on producing iron and steel and harnessing electric power to birth entirely new industries, like automobile production and communication technologies. It is responsible for pivotal inventions like the light bulb, internal combustion engine, and telephone. This revolution also set itself apart by its unprecedented rate of production – it didn’t simply mechanically produce goods; it mass-produced them.

Second Industrial Revolution

The advancements catalyzed by these first two revolutions allowed people to enjoy cheaper goods, more wealth, and a higher standard of living. This trend continued with our most recent industrial revolution. The Digital Revolution of the late 20th century effectively migrated information online. It leveraged inventions like electronics, computers, and the Internet to automate entire phases of production. It empowered businesses to globalize, outsource, and expand at unprecedented speeds.

Third Industrial Revolution

Each of these revolutions was catalyzed by an emerging technology – steam power, electric power, the all-powerful Internet – that took work out of humans’ hands and accelerated it beyond incremental linear growth. They had an outsized effect on society, seemingly overnight – they redefined entire systems of working, rendered certain jobs obsolete, and birthed completely new industries. These revolutions weren’t just “bigger and better” – they were paradigm shifts that redefined labor and production for a generation.

The revolution of our generation

Despite massive leaps in technology from the Digital Revolution, much work and industry today is still manual and labor-intensive. That is set to change in the current Industrial Revolution. Instead of simply automating things, this Fourth Industrial Revolution is building technologies that combine knowledge across previously unrelated disciplines, to transform entire systems of production at an exponential rate. It steps into spaces previously dominated by human experts and builds technologies to outperform those humans – often by orders of magnitude.

This cross-pollination of our most advanced findings opens up a world of possibilities. We see digital technology interfacing with the physical world, with the Internet of Things and 3D printing. We also see digital tools making sense of biological problems, as with medical software used to detect diseases and develop vaccines. And of course, we have physical robots run by digital minds – from warehouse robots to self-driving cars.

Internet of Things

If there is any cross-disciplinary field that will play a huge role in defining this Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s robotics. This field is building “collaborators” who can think, reason, and learn alongside us. With advancements across artificial intelligence, computer vision, and hardware, we’re now able to tackle new problems by leaning on the knowledge of our newly “sentient” colleagues.

How Foxglove is contributing to the revolution

It’s awe-inspiring to recognize that roboticists are solving problems that we believed intractable just a few years ago. With that said, there are still several categories of challenges that we have yet to address – from generalization and hardware challenges, to deploying humanoid robots for especially complex tasks.

Our team at Foxglove is tackling a less frequently discussed challenge in robotics – building robust developer tools. We think building robots is much more difficult than it needs to be. With the painful lack of off-the-shelf options, roboticists have to navigate difficult-to-integrate applications, fragmented or overlapping resources, and a steep learning curve for the tools that do exist. In short, robotics currently feels like building websites in the ‘90s – instead of delivering value to our users, we’re fighting against baseline problems like how to buy and rack our servers (or in our case, how to get our tools working).

Foxglove's guiding mission is to close the gap between the industry's tooling and its needs. As we develop exciting new technologies, we need equally novel ways to troubleshoot and iterate on them. By reimagining the next generation of robotics tooling, we hope we can help roboticists – across sectors, use cases, and audiences – accelerate their development and bring their products to market.

Foxglove Studio screenshot

Working with robotics data is an especially important part of robotics development. By gleaning insights from their data, engineers can get a sense of how their robots are performing, and where in the stack they may need to adjust an algorithm or squash a bug. Rich interactive visualizations – like the ones in Foxglove Studio – give roboticists a barometer by which they can assess and track their progress. Intuitive interfaces for organizing, tagging, and searching data – like Foxglove Data Platform – help them spend less time wandering aimlessly through petabytes of data and more time separating the meaningful signals from the noise.

Foxglove has been partnering with robotics teams – across industries like space exploration, autonomous vehicles, and ocean research – to build solutions that can be generalized across the wider community. Our goal is to chip away at the friction around managing and exploring our data, regardless of your particular team's use cases and audience.

What the future holds

Since robotics can be applied to almost every single industry in the world, it will likely disrupt them all to varying degrees. It’s exciting to think about the explosive growth we'll experience in this Fourth Industrial Revolution – especially as robots can reliably free up more time for us to focus on our yet-unsolved problems.

Even though Foxglove is only one company in this sprint towards the future, we’re excited to contribute in our own way. We’ve started by focusing on helping people visualize and manage their robotics data, but the possibilities are endless. We don't know what else we’ll find, but we do know this revolution will redefine our lives – we hope you’ll join us for the ride.


The Future of Robotics

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