“The adoption of Foxglove was swift, with the impact being viscerally clear from the first day, and it continues to deliver value two years into Saronic’s operations.” Vibhav Altekar, Co-founder & VP of Software, Saronic

Saronic is a defense technology company that is redefining maritime superiority for the U.S. Navy and its allies. Saronic is delivering the most intelligent and advanced Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) at the speed and scale required to meet the growing needs of the Joint Force. Working alongside human operated systems, Saronic’s ASVs serve as force multipliers to existing fleets and enhance the operational capabilities of naval forces, allowing them to go farther and do more while reducing risk to human life and the mission.

Challenges without Foxglove

Saronic is focused on building robust and reliable autonomy in their ASVs. The underlying piece of infrastructure that enables rapid iteration on their autonomy models is replayable services and complete levels of observability and visualization across their robotic platforms.

The team at Saronic collectively experienced significant challenges in robotics development in the past – from scalability, visualization, and data management to velocity and focus. Founding and early members of the Saronic team previously struggled to collect multimodal data for debugging, replay data faster than real time, and build custom visualizations to better understand the data. They understood that they needed a plug-and-play method for extracting information from their subsystems and visualizing data to overcome these historic challenges and accelerate the development of their robotics platform. This led them to the adoption of Foxglove from day one.

“The lift on building custom robotics development tooling, specifically visualization, is so high that it detracts from the goal of building features and autonomy for the robots.” Vibhav Altekar, Co-founder & VP of Software, Saronic

Adopting Foxglove to accelerate development and scale Saronic’s business

The integration of Saronic’s ASVs acts as a force multiplier and extends a fleet’s area of influence while also expanding its operational capabilities to more effectively meet the needs of the modern maritime domain. Saronic is enabling this through collaborative autonomy and swarming capabilities that allow a single operator to control multiple vessels at once. This significantly reduces the cognitive burden on that operator.

Foxglove is the force multiplier reducing cognitive load on Saronic’s engineering and development teams, in the same way Saronic is to their customers. The main intention of deeply embedding Foxglove into their development workflows was to allow the team to focus on and accelerate building robust and reliable autonomy through rapid iteration. Foxglove, along with the combination of MCAP, provides a plug-and-play solution for extracting, managing, and visualizing multimodal data from Saronic's robotic platforms. This significantly reduces the lift required to reinvent and develop the required tooling, while also keeping costs low.

Developing complex tooling and visualizations requires dedicated engineers to design, implement and maintain. With Foxglove, Saronic’s Autonomy and Perception team has reclaimed more than 20% of their time that would have otherwise been spent on crafting those complex visualizations and tools.

The benefits of integrating Foxglove extend beyond the Autonomy and Perception team as well. Naval architects, mechanical engineers and non-technical staff are empowered to easily understand the impacts of design and implementation decisions using Foxglove’s visualizations and data insights. For example, mechanical engineers can now understand improvements on steering designs and naval architects can realize improvements in hull design. The quick and easy data analysis that Foxglove provides gives individuals that generally have a slower development cycle a whole new view on engineering.

The outcome and impact of using Foxglove

Today, Saronic has 50+ engineers - which is more than 30% of the company - on-boarded to Foxglove, enabling teams to triage issues quickly and iterate faster on its software. Teams are also able to quickly pull logs following software testing, inspect and replay when issues are discovered, and have a new version available for testing in less than 24 hours.

By partnering with Foxglove, Saronic is bringing their growing family of ASVs to market faster –putting critical autonomous capabilities into the hands of warfighters to reduce the risks associated with operating in high-stakes environments.

Bottom line, the streamlined workflows and improved collaboration facilitated by Foxglove continues to result in a faster time to market for new ASV features and capabilities across Saronic’s product lines. The two-year-old company has a laser focus on their mission and continues to deliver on their promise to bring the most intelligent and advanced ASVs to the U.S. Navy and its allies, at scale.