Visualization and observability software provider Foxglove recently released a case study on the use of its digital twin platform for autonomous commercial mower provider Greenzie.
Atlanta, Ga.-based Greenzie 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 collaborative robotics operator assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies.
Greenzie’s primary customers are commercial landscapers and lawn maintenance companies - which Foxglove said includes the largest landscaper in the U.S. - servicing large turf areas like athletic fields, industrial parks, and educational campuses.
Data collection, analysis, sharing required manual effort
Before adopting Foxglove, Greenzie faced significant challenges in data management, incident analysis, and debugging. Its process required long syncs to get robot operating system (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. With over 21,000 acres mowed by Greenzie machines in 2023, the company found this process was a major hindrance, both for customer operations and for new product development.
The data collection process would be followed by time-consuming synchronization and playback using multiple tools such as RViz, Gazebo, and PlotJuggler, Foxglove said.
Aside from the operational challenges of using multiple tools to visualize the robotics data, Greenzie also faced the challenge of sharing visualizations, both within its own team and with its customers, while working to triage issues.
Greenzie relies heavily on customer feedback to improve its product, so altogether this setup led to delays in problem resolution, hindering its ability to rapidly iterate and improve its products, Foxglove said.
Cloud-based simulation tools provide sharable, specific views
Greenzie opted to connect to its mowers over a VPN in order to use Foxglove directly. Using this setup allows Greenzie customers to focus on its own jobs - keeping lawns beautiful - without the hassle of manually offloading data from its mowers.
Foxglove said its cloud-based system enables rapid sharing of diagnostic information and visual feedback directly with clients, showing each mower's operational status and environment. Using Foxglove has accelerated Greenzie's development and debugging processes, and ultimately its time-to-market with improvements, new features, and capabilities, Foxglove said.
Greenzie uses Foxglove to quickly access and visualize robotics data without using multitudes of simulation tools it had to use in the past. The company makes use of both shareable layouts and links to view and share data in order to work collaboratively as a team.
“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,” said Brian Cochran, Greenzie robotics software engineer.
Foxglove said Greenzie has also built its own plugins that allows it to view certain sensor-specific custom views within Foxglove. Its message converter extension for depth and spatial detections is available as open source.
Greenzie also makes use of Foxglove in its 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.
Foxglove allows collaborative, automated incident response
On the customer-facing side, Greenzie customers no longer need to manually transfer data. Since customer data is now uploaded to Foxglove automatically, Greenzie can catch incidents before they are reported.
Foxglove said it 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.
“Before Foxglove, our incident triage process could take an entire day,” said Charles Quinn, Greenzie co-founder and CEO. “Now, I can look at any incident in 30 seconds and have an answer.”
Internally, Foxglove said it has enabled better collaboration, allowing multiple Greenzie team members to work on a problem simultaneously. Greenzie uses Foxglove events to mark incidents and shared layouts and shareable links to collaborate.
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 said.
Foxglove said its ability to streamline the data analysis and visualization processes has allowed 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, which Foxglove said ultimately enhances Greenzie's market position 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,” Quinn said.
Want to learn more about data management in robots? This article was featured in the September 2024 Robotics 24/7 Special Focus Issue titled “Robots as mobile data platforms.”
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