“Foxglove didn’t just make our engineers more efficient—it made our entire company more agile, enabling faster deployments, better customer support, and greater reliability across the board.” Dennis Siedlak, CTO and Founder at Slip Robotics

Slip Robotics is transforming short-haul freight transport with autonomous loading and unloading robots (SlipBots) designed to optimize supply chain logistics. Their SlipBot platform automates high-frequency truck movements between warehouses, factories, and distribution centers, reducing manual labor and operational delays. The company emerged from the realization that a significant portion of supply chain inefficiencies occur not on the road but in the moments between loading and unloading. By enabling seamless, autonomous freight transfers, Slip Robotics helps manufacturers and distributors increase efficiency, cut costs, and improve throughput without requiring significant infrastructure changes.

Debugging workflows slowed troubleshooting and growth without Foxglove.

Before adopting Foxglove, Slip Robotics relied on a fragmented set of tools for debugging and analyzing robot telemetry. Engineers manually downloaded large ROS bag files from AWS S3, wrote custom scripts to extract relevant data, and pieced together logs to diagnose issues. The process was time-consuming and inefficient, often taking 10 minutes or more just to retrieve the right dataset before even beginning analysis.

Live debugging required setting up complex ROS networking configurations, making remote troubleshooting impractical. Non-engineering teams had limited access to robot telemetry, which meant that diagnosing operational issues often required waiting on developers to interpret data. Sharing debugging insights between teams was cumbersome, with files being manually uploaded and passed around, leading to delays in troubleshooting and issue resolution. As Slip Robotics scaled its fleet, these inefficiencies compounded, making it clear that their existing workflows could not support long-term growth.

“With Foxglove, we’ve removed the friction in debugging—what used to take hours across multiple tools now happens in minutes, all in one place.” Dennis Siedlak, CTO and Founder at Slip Robotics

Reducing operational overhead with Foxglove.

Integrating Foxglove into Slip Robotics’ workflow required minimal changes to their existing infrastructure. A single AWS Lambda function update enabled automatic ingestion of ROS bag files into Foxglove’s platform, eliminating the need for engineers to manually retrieve and process logs. With Foxglove’s API, they transitioned from running custom AWS queries and stitching together raw files to directly accessing structured telemetry data. Engineers adopted Foxglove’s visualization tools immediately, using them to inspect robot motion, sensor data, and diagnostics without relying on manual scripting or multiple debugging tools.

Slip Robotics also integrated Foxglove’s API into their automated monitoring pipeline, enabling real-time telemetry tracking across deployed robots. They implemented scripts that pull targeted diagnostic data—such as motor currents and sensor health—without requiring full dataset downloads. Field teams incorporated Foxglove deep links into their workflows, allowing them to flag and share relevant log data directly with engineers and customer success managers. This eliminated the previous need for manual file transfers and log searches, streamlining collaboration between on-site teams and engineering.

Outside of development, Slip Robotics extended Foxglove to their field support and customer success operations. They embedded Foxglove links in reports and automated alerts, ensuring that both technical and non-technical teams could access real-time robot performance data instantly. Within days, they transitioned from a fragmented, manual debugging process to a fully integrated, centralized system, allowing teams across the company to inspect and diagnose robot behavior without delays or engineering dependencies.

“Foxglove lets us scale without worrying about bottlenecks in debugging and maintenance.” Dennis Siedlak, CTO and Founder at Slip Robotics

Using Foxglove increased reliability and enabled scaling efficiently.

Engineers now spend less time handling ROS bag files and more time refining robot behavior, improving autonomy, and deploying new features. Debugging sessions that once required complex ROS networking setups are now handled instantly with a single Foxglove link, reducing turnaround time for troubleshooting and accelerating issue resolution.

Leveraging Foxglove's API enabled Slip Robotics to shift from reactive to proactive maintenance, detecting early signs of motor degradation, sensor drift, or communication failures before they impact operations. Automated monitoring scripts analyze real-time data trends, allowing engineers to flag potential failures and schedule maintenance before robots go out of service. These insights ensure maximum uptime, increasing fleet reliability and reducing costly disruptions for customers.

Foxglove has also improved cross-team collaboration, making robot performance data accessible beyond the engineering team. Field technicians and customer success managers can inspect real-time diagnostics and share time-synchronized visualizations without needing engineering intervention. The ability to instantly generate and share pre-filtered Foxglove deep links has eliminated the need for manual log retrieval, allowing teams to troubleshoot remotely and resolve issues faster. 

By integrating Foxglove, Slip Robotics has accelerated its ability to diagnose and resolve issues, strengthened its operational reliability, and positioned itself to scale its autonomous logistics platform with confidence.