Hey! Great to hear from someone in the same boat. I completely agree, the general dev experience and tooling around ROS can be deeply frustrating...
I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.
I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?
(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)
Foxglove is not the only name in town. There are many, Transitive Robotics, the company I'm building is one of them. Different from Foxglove we are much more focused on live-remote monitoring and control, e.g., we have a pretty popular remote teleoperation module: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/transitive-robotics/remo...
You can find all the other modules we're currently offering here: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/
The platform itself is and remains open-source.
Just to clarify: I didn't work at Boston Dynamics, I worked for a company that used their hardware (among others) as platforms for our own projects.
I knew about BD's history with DARPA, of course. The issue was that my company was doing some actually really interesting non-defense work, and then decided to pivot and mount teleoperated weapons on these platforms for a new demo. That’s when I submitted my resignation :)
I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.
I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?
(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)