8 posts tagged with "ros"

Mobile robots produce a lot of data (camera images, IMU readings, logs, etc). Storing this data reliably on each robot and syncing it to the cloud can be hard. ReductStore makes this easier: it's a lightweight, time-series object store built for robotics and industrial IoT. It stores binary blobs (images, logs, CSV sensor data, MCAP, JSON) with timestamps and labels so you can quickly find and query them later.

This introduction guide explains a simple setup where each robot stores data locally and automatically syncs it to a cloud ReductStore instance backed by Amazon S3.

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.

At ReductStore, we specialize in the high-performance storage and streaming of robotics data from edge devices to the cloud. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to develop a robust ROS 2 data logging pipeline for practical robotics applications.

First, we will set up a Raspberry Pi with a USB camera running a lightweight YOLOv5n object detection model via ONNX Runtime. Then, a recorder node will capture selected ROS 2 topics, including images, detection results, and logs. Next, these topics will be saved as segmented MCAP files locally with ReductStore. Finally, we will configure automatic replication to stream data to another ReductStore instance.

This minimal setup shows how to efficiently capture, store, and replicate ROS 2 data from a robot to a central server or cloud instance. These techniques can be applied to any ROS 2 system, whether it's a single robot or a fleet of autonomous systems.

Let's get started!