“It just works. Not only has it supercharged our dev processes, it has also helped us build stronger relationships with our customers and win new deals.” Troy Gibb, Staff Robotics Software Engineer at Polymath Robotics

Polymath Robotics specializes in off-road autonomy, delivering advanced solutions for industries such as agriculture, mining, construction, and delivery robotics. Their platform includes vehicle-agnostic safety systems, autonomous vehicle-following capabilities, and remote software deployment, enabling seamless integration with various industrial vehicles and sensors.

By managing core autonomy functions like path planning, hazard detection, behavior trees, and safety protocols, Polymath allows robotics teams to skip foundational development and focus on creating high-value, market-ready autonomy. Their suite of 40 autonomous navigation modules offers unmatched flexibility, accelerating deployment timelines and reducing the need for large engineering teams.

With a focus on reliability, scalability, and customer-centric design, Polymath Robotics empowers companies to bring autonomous systems to market faster, using fewer resources while maintaining industry-leading performance and safety standards.

Challenges without Foxglove.

Before adopting Foxglove, Polymath Robotics faced challenges in their development and debugging workflows. The team relied on RViz, a live robot visualization tool lacking data replay capabilities, forcing developers to debug in real time. This made troubleshooting high-friction and unreliable, as past events couldn’t be revisited easily, complicating root cause analysis and slowing development cycles.

Their process involved multiple tools for data inspection and analysis, logging, and sharing results from debugging. Engineers manually compiled screenshots, raw logs, and videos in an attempt to collaborate and debug, consuming valuable development time and increasing the risk of human error. Communicating results to clients was also difficult, as reports often lacked clarity and the ability to share easily, limiting Polymath’s ability to showcase its technological strengths.

These inefficiencies threatened Polymath’s competitive edge, especially during critical customer evaluations where competitors faced similar limitations. Recognizing the need for a more integrated and scalable solution, Polymath adopted Foxglove.

Adopting Foxglove.

The team’s first step was incorporating Foxglove’s core visualization features, including 3D and Plot panels, raw message inspection, and customizable user scripts. These capabilities allowed developers to replay recorded data, easily inspect outputs, and trace events across a time. This marked a major shift from live robot debugging to a post-processing approach, enabling deeper insights and efficient collaboration.

Polymath also integrated Foxglove into its reporting pipeline. Instead of relying on screenshots and raw log dumps, they used the platform to generate clear, data-rich visualizations. They captured animated GIFs of system performance directly from Foxglove, embedding them into client-facing reports. This provided a level of transparency and technical depth that competitors couldn’t match, giving Polymath a critical advantage during customer evaluations.

“Sharing clear, transparent visualizations with our customers and prospective customers builds a level of trust and confidence we simply could not attain without Foxglove.” Troy Gibb, Staff Robotics Software Engineer at Polymath Robotics

The impact of using Foxglove.

Foxglove’s visualization tools enabled Polymath to create detailed, data-driven reports showcasing sensor inputs, vehicle movements, and decision-making processes. During competitive “bake-offs” against leading OEMs, Polymath leverages these capabilities to produce clear, dynamic visualization of their vehicle safety system in action—something their competitors haven’t replicated. This level of transparency and technical depth helps Polymath win the contracts and secure new business opportunities.

Beyond debugging, Foxglove strengthened internal onboarding time from days to hours for new developers and accelerated testing times too. Within days of integrating Foxglove, the team saw improvements in development cycle times, data analysis accuracy, and project delivery, eliminating prior manual overhead, saving valuable time, and accelerating progress by several days.

Ultimately, Foxglove became a cornerstone of Polymath’s robotics development process. It empowered the team to work more efficiently, reduce development time, and communicate their technological advantages with greater clarity and confidence—directly contributing to critical contract wins and sustained business growth.