Greenzie, a pioneering technology company based in Atlanta, is on a mission to free humans from repetitive outdoor labor. Specializing in the lawn care industry, Greenzie develops software to enhance the capabilities of commercial mowers through operator assistance and autonomous technologies. Their primary customers are commercial landscapers and lawn maintenance companies (including the largest landscaper in the US) servicing large turf areas like athletic fields, industrial parks, and educational campuses.

Challenges: manual data collection and multiple tools

Before adopting Foxglove, Greenzie faced significant challenges in data management, incident analysis, and debugging. Their process required long syncs to get ROS bag files, sometimes even involving manually collecting data from the robots by mailing a physical hard drive to customers. Greenzie works with lawn care companies all over the country, and with over 21,000 acres mowed by Greenzie machines in 2023, this was a major hindrance, both for customer operations and for new product development.

This arduous process would be followed by laborious synchronization and playback using multiple tools such as RViz, Gazebo, and PlotJuggler. Aside from the operational challenges of using multiple tools to visualize the robotics data, Greenzie also faced the challenge of sharing visualizations, both within their own team and with their customers, while working to triage issues. Greenzie relies heavily on customer feedback to improve their product, so altogether this setup led to delays in problem resolution, hindering their ability to rapidly iterate and improve their products.

“Before Foxglove, our incident triage process could take an entire day. Now, I can look at any incident in 30 seconds and have an answer.” Charles Quinn, Co-founder and CEO of Greenzie

Implementation: engineering, customer success, and business development

Greenzie opted to connect to their mowers over a VPN in order to use Foxglove directly. Using this setup allows Greenzie customers to focus on their own jobs — keeping lawns beautiful — without the hassle of manually offloading data from their mowers. Foxglove's cloud-based system enables rapid sharing of diagnostic information and visual feedback directly with clients, showcasing the mower's operational status and environment.

Using Foxglove has significantly accelerated Greenzie's development and debugging processes, and ultimately their time-to-market with improvements, new features and capabilities. Greenzie uses Foxglove to quickly access and visualize robotics data without resorting to the multitudes of tools they had to use in the past. They make use of both the shareable layouts and the links to view and share data in order to work collaboratively as a team. They have also built their own plugins that allow them to view certain sensor-specific custom views within Foxglove. Their message converter extension for depth and spatial detections is even available as open source. This has all enabled the rapid development iteration they always dreamed of.

Greenzie also makes use of Foxglove in their business development efforts: at conferences, Greenzie uses Foxglove to showcase the real-time visualization of mower operations, offering attendees a live demonstration of the technology in action.

“The fact that Foxglove just works with ROS, without any additional setup or software, has been a selling point for many members of our team, including our tier 1 support team.” Brian Cochran, Robotics Software Engineer, Greenzie

Impact: rapid incident catch and triage

On the customer-facing side, using Foxglove has allowed Greenzie to free their customers from the burden of transferring data. Since customer data is now uploaded to Foxglove automatically, Greenzie can even catch incidents before they are reported. Foxglove has replaced multiple tools for Greenzie, reducing the time required to analyze incidents from a full day to under an hour, and sometimes even under 30 minutes.

Internally, Foxglove has enabled better collaboration, allowing multiple team members to work on a problem simultaneously. Greenzie uses Foxglove events to mark incidents and Shared layouts and Shareable links to collaborate efficiently. The gained efficiency has not only sped up internal operations but also improved customer trust and satisfaction by enabling faster response times to issues reported in the field.

Foxglove's ability to streamline the data analysis and visualization processes has been instrumental in allowing Greenzie to focus more on innovation and less on solving technical issues. The tool's extensibility and ease of use have fostered a proactive approach to product improvement and customer service, ultimately enhancing Greenzie's market position as a leader in autonomous outdoor lawn care equipment.

“Thanks to Foxglove we're no longer spending time fighting with tooling — we're developing revenue-generating product and helping our customers, which is why we exist.”Charles Quinn, Co-founder and CEO of Greenzie

Conclusion

Greenzie's adoption of Foxglove represents a significant step forward in the use of advanced technology for enhancing productivity and operational efficiency in the robotic lawn care industry. By effectively leveraging Foxglove, Greenzie has not only improved its development workflows but has also enhanced its customer engagement and service delivery, setting a new standard in the integration of technology within a green industry.