Foxglove standardizes robotics data recording

Organization Name: Foxglove

Country: USA

Website: foxglove.dev/

Year Founded: 2021

Number of Employees: 11-50

Innovation Class: Technology, Product & Services

Innovation Subclass: Technology & Product Introduction

Description:

MCAP is a standardized container file format for storing heterogeneous robotics data. It can record multiple streams of structured and unstructured data – in a variety of serialization formats like ROS 1 ROS 2, Protobuf, JSON Schema and FlatBuffers – in a single file. In addition to the file format spec, Foxglove provides libraries in C++, Python, Go, Swift, and TypeScript to help robotics developers start reading data from and writing data to MCAP files.

Analysis:

By standardizing robotics data recording and making it more failure-proof, MCAP is tackling a major problem with wide-reaching implications. Roboticists can not only record their data files more performantly, but they can also more easily collaborate on this data by integrating with systems and tools that support this new standard. Because MCAP is serialization-agnostic and thus flexible enough to evolve with a team’s data decisions, more companies across robotics are adopting this format to take advantage of its benefits.

Prior to releasing MCAP, countless robotics companies spent valuable inhouse resources to develop custom file formats, only to create more future work and complicate third-party integrations. Foxglove identified a clear need for a general-purpose, open-source data container format –specifically optimized for robotics use cases.

RR – Steve Crowe