17 posts tagged with "robotics"

A rosbag recording is ultimately written to files, and a single file cannot grow forever. Something has to close it at some point, so rosbag2 makes you pick: ros2 bag record -a -b 100000 closes one every 100 kilobytes, or -d 9000 closes one every 9000 seconds. Either way, a recording that runs for hours comes out as a directory of many small files instead of one huge file that becomes awkward to work with.

Splitting a recording into five minute bags seems like a simple solution. The problem starts when you need to turn them back into one file.

A rosbag2 user reported that merging 300 GB of split recordings required roughly 600 GB of disk capacity. The original 300 GB stays on disk while another 300 GB is written out as the merged bag.

Splitting solves one problem. Merging creates another, and it is easy to underestimate.

InfluxDB works well for robotics metrics such as battery level, temperature, CPU usage, detection counts, and anomaly scores. These numeric values are a good fit for dashboards, alerts, and time-series analytics.

Robots also generate much heavier data: camera frames, LiDAR scans, audio, and high-frequency waveform chunks. This raw data must often be preserved in its original format for incident replay, debugging, and model training.

You do not need to replace InfluxDB. Keep it for the metrics you need to visualize and analyze, and add ReductStore for the raw sensor data. Use the same event time and stable robot and sensor identifiers in both systems so a metric can be traced back to the original records.

Robotics teams today wrestle with data that grows faster than their infrastructure. Every robot generates streams of images, sensor readings, logs, and events in different formats. These data piles are fragmented, expensive to move, and slow to analyze. Teams often rely on generic cloud tools that are not built for robotics. They charge way too much per gigabyte (when it should cost little per terabyte), hide the raw data behind proprietary APIs, and make it hard for robots (and developers) to access or use their own data.

ReductStore introduces a new category: a database purpose built for robotics data pipelines. It is open, efficient, and developer friendly. It lets teams store, query, and manage any time series of unstructured data directly from robots to the cloud.