Meetings

This page lists all the meetings that have occurred as part of the working group.

All meetings are public and held every two weeks from 1600-1700 UTC. Please feel free to join us. There are some details below for extra information:

• ROS Discourse with tag wg-cloud-robotics.
• Google Group, where you can sign up to be notified of future updates.
• Google Meet room, where we meet online.
• Google Drive folder, where we keep all of our public documents.
• Open Robotics Community Calendar, where you can sign up to receive calendar reminders of our meetings.

If you have an interesting topic of discussion for the group, please propose that topic using the Github Issue.

2025-06-30: Logging & Observability Discussion (Upcoming) CANCELLED​

This meeting is cancelled as the host is unwell. Meetings will resumse as normal from the 14th July.

Previous text:

In the upcoming session, the group plans to go over the research performed to this date. This includes the first preparation session and the previous session, where we hosted a discussion with Benji Barash, Co-Founder and CEO of Roboto.AI.

This will be a quieter, more relaxed session, as some of the members are unable to attend.

2025-06-16: Guest Expert Benji Barash from Roboto AI​

The group invited guest expert Benji Barash, Co-Founder and CEO at Roboto AI, to discuss Logging & Observability.

Benji leads Roboto AI, which provides an analytics engine for physical AI. The company focuses on searching, transforming, and analyzing data from robots at scale. Previously, Benji led engineering and science teams at Amazon Robotics, with a focus on simulation and autonomy.

The meeting became more of a presentation and Q&A, as Benji had slides and demos ready to run. He showed very impressive tech from Roboto.AI, including the ability to select a clip of robot data and search other datasets for similar clips to find similar motions!

The full meeting recording is available below.

2025-06-02: Logging and Observability Preparation​

The group met to start researching Logging & Observability, with the intention of gathering information for a community guide on the subject. Collectively, they gathered the following points to consider going forwards:

• Format for recording logs and data: structured data? Unstructured? Strings? JSON? Rosbags?
• Online vs offline data upload: collecting data offline for uploading later
• Automatic incident detection: is data collection constant, or triggered by a specific event, or possibly by a developer?
• Message publishing frequency: a slower message publishing frequency often indicates a system issue.
• Cause of Issue: determining the cause of the issue, if there is one.
• Publishing Protocol: MQTT, ROS2 topics, HTTP, or other. Advantages and disadvantages of each method.
• On demand vs constant logging
• Interfacing with observability tools: publishing or formatting data to be compatible with observability tools such as Prometheus
• Live visualisation tools: pros and cons of different tools such as RViz and Foxglove. For example, Foxglove can provide a web link, which is easier to share to other team members.
• Levels of data upload: minimal upload such as basic logs; rosbags with debug data; developer-triggered upload of all robot information.
• Custom downsampling: topics can be downsampled depending on the quantity of data and the bandwidth available. Another option is to extract important information, such as the closest lidar point or the classes recognised from the camera, to reduce the data uploaded.
• Target user of data: who will make use of the data? This affects how the data is presented and used.

The group ended by discussing potential guest experts that could help provide information and insights for the guide.

If you would like to see the meeting recording, it is available on YouTube:

2025-05-19: Ideas for Cloud Robotics Guides​

The group met and used this time to discuss possible guides for publishing on Cloud Robotics Hub. This would make our expertise available to the public in an easily digestible format.

As part of the meeting, we agreed to post a poll to the community to get a better idea of priority on each suggested topic. The results are in this blog post.

If you would like to see the meeting recording, it is available on YouTube:

2025-05-05: Continued Discussion: Uploading Robot Data to the Cloud​

In this meeting, the group met to continue their discussion about uploading robot data to the cloud. They expanded from the previous discussion to include more important details about the data being uploaded, such as the moment it was captured versus an incident, to give one example.

The group also discussed difficulties with cloud data collection, such as the difficulty of automatic anomaly detection, and how companies frequently have to build their own data collection solution to meet their needs.

If you would like to see the meeting recording, it is available on YouTube:

2025-04-07: Discussion: Uploading Robot Data to the Cloud​

The group used this meeting to discuss uploading robot data to the cloud. Together, they worked through the most useful information to convey to robotics developers, resulting in the start of a Google Doc to organise the most important data by category of robotics.

The group finished by agreeing to continue the discussion in the following session.

If you would like to see the meeting recording, it is available on YouTube:

2025-03-24: General Catch-Up​

In this shorter session, two members met and discussed the use of LLMs in robotic and software development, then agreed on a new format that could be used in future sessions: proposing a discussion topic in advance and using the session to discuss that topic.

Based on this agreement, a new Github Issue can be used to propose discussion topics for future meetings. Anyone can post to the issue and join in the discussion.

If you would like to see the meeting recording, it is available on YouTube:

2025-02-24: Robot Deployment Discussion​

In this session, the group discussed their preferences and issues with the most popular deployment methods. The group agreed that distribution via Docker containers was the best method, but still had issues, such as the large download sizes of images. Later in the session, the group also discussed a possible project to remotely disable particular functions of a robot remotely.

If you would like to see the meeting recording, it is available on YouTube:

2025-02-10: Testing KubeEdge (For Real, This Time)​

The group had their second meeting to try out KubeEdge, having heard more about it from Tomoya Fujita in a guest talk.

Two of the members had some success with the prerequisites for KubeEdge, but neither were able to connect a Raspberry Pi to a cloud machine as an edge device. They were able to get a Kubernetes cluster connecting to another machine on the same network, treating it as an edge device and seeing ROS 2 traffic between the two machines.

The group summarised their experience of KubeEdge:

We found KubeEdge to be conceptually very powerful, and the functionality we did get working was very impressive. This looks to be an excellent way to manage robots or other edge devices at an enterprise level. However, we did have difficulties setting up KubeEdge for a Raspberry Pi at the edge. We think the following might be helpful to get others onboarded with KubeEdge:

1. It would be great to have a complete reference setup. Set up an EC2 instance with an elastic IP, set up the K8s network from scratch, and get a Raspberry Pi (or VM on another machine) to join as an edge device.
2. Some instructions in the setup documentation assume prior knowledge. For example, in the KubeEdge example led-raspberrypi, the last step is to change the device Twin attribute, but the instruction does not say how to do so.
3. It would be good to have a way of setting up multicast for ROS 2 that doesn't require changes at the cluster admin level to adjust for changes in the ROS 2 network. For example, if the domain ID changes, a new multicast address must be enabled for the cluster, which requires cluster admin rights. The alternative is to configure both the multicast IP address and subscriber IP addresses for each pod, which is more complicated.

If you would like to see the meeting recording, it is available on YouTube:

2025-01-27: Finding KubeEdge Prerequisites​

This meeting, the group planned to meet to test out KubeEdge. After the meeting started, the group realised that there were a number of prerequisites needed to try KubeEdge, including an active Kubernetes cluster (preferably in the cloud) and some hardware to deploy to, such as a Raspberry Pi with LED.

The group agreed to set up the prerequisites and attempt the tryout session in the next session. The group also agreed that for future tryout sessions, they would read through prerequisites in advance to make sure the meeting can go ahead.

If you would like to watch the meeting, you can see the recording below.

2025-01-13​

The group had a general discussion of the latest in robotics news, including NVIDIA Cosmos, the proliferation of humanoid robotics at present, what cloud robotics encompasses, and what to do in the next meeting. The group settled on doing a KubeEdge trial unless a guest speaker is available.

If you would like to watch the meeting, you can see the recording below.

2024-12-16 Guest Talk: Robotics Platform empowered by Cloud-Native Technologies (Tomoya Fujita)​

In this meeting, we hosted a talk by by Tomoya Fujita, a software engineer, contributor to ROS2 core, and well-respected community builder.

Tomoya talked about a range of Cloud-Native Technologies he has worked on, and their relevance to robotics. In particular, Tomoya has done a great deal of work on KubeEdge, a platform built on Kubernetes that can be used to deploy software to robots as if they are Kubernetes clusters. Some resources from his talk include:

• ROSCon 2023: ROS with Kubernetes / KubeEdge
• Some examples to deploy ROS / ROS 2 with Kubernetes
• Next-generation Robotics Platform for Edge/Cloud

More information on the talk is available on the blog post, including a link to the recording posted on YouTube.

If you are interested in seeing the entire meeting, the recording is available here:

2024-12-02 | Testing Eclipse Zenoh​

In this meeting, the group spent the time trying out the workshop from Eclipse Zenoh that was used in the latest ROSCon. Together, they accomplished a few of the exercises and discussed the ease of setup, and some comments they could give as feedback.

The workshop is available from Github. The group completed exercises 1, 2, and 5, then two members sent messages to each other using the instructions in exercise 3.

The meeting recording is available below:

2024-11-18​

The group caught up on the latest robotics news and discussed GenAI in robotics and the start-ups using them. The group then agreed to focus on Eclipse Zenoh for its next meeting.

If you would like to watch the meeting, you can see the recording below.

2024-11-04 Guest Talk: Eclipse Zenoh and its offering for Cloud Connectivity (Julien Enoch)​

The group hosted a talk by Julien Enoch, a Senior Solutions Architect at ZettaScale Technology and Eclipse Zenoh committer.

Julien spoke about the Zenoh protocol, which can run everywhere, from micro-controllers to the Cloud; over TCP, UDP, QUIC, and Websockets. Zenoh provides a software router that can be deployed in any Cloud instance such as AWS EC2, and that can route the protocol between different subsystems. The talk also covered how this is particularly helpful for Connectivity in Cloud Robotics, with a video demonstration of controlling a robot in California from an RViz instance in France!

If you would like to see the talk, which took the whole meeting time, see the recording below.

2024-10-21​

The group discussed recent conferences, possible resources for the Cloud Robotics Hub, and methods of working offline to accomplish more between meetings. The group also discussed their opinions on how the Working Group was doing, with the aim of recognising their successes and considering how to improve going forwards.

The full meeting recording is available below.

2024-10-07 Guest Talk: Enabling Usable and Reliable Cloud Robotics with FogROS2 (Kaiyuan Eric Chen)​

The group hosted a talk about FogROS2 presented by Kaiyuan Eric Chen, a PhD student in the Department of Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and a member of Berkeley Automation Lab working closely with Ken Goldberg and Jeffrey Ichnowski.

More information about the presentation, including a summary of its content and some links, are available on the blog post.

The group spent some time at the end discussing recent news in robotics, and the plan for the next meeting.

The full meeting recording is available below.

2024-09-23 Talk: CloudGripper (Florian Pokorny)​

The group hosted a talk about CloudGripper, An Open Source Cloud Robotics Testbed for Robotic Manipulation Research, Benchmarking and Data Collection at Scale by Florian Pokorny, Associate Professor of Machine Learning at KTH Royal Institute Technology and Co-Founder of Scaleup Robotics.

Here's a link to the blog post and talk recording.

Find the full meeting recording below.

2024-09-09​

The group discussed the launch of the new Cloud Robotics Hub site and discussed potential improvements. Akash Vibhute from Intrinsic/OpenRMF attended and we discussed him possibly presenting to the group, potentially along the lines of his upcoming ROSCon talk.

2024-08-26​

This meeting, the group discussed updates on the hub site, then talked about the work occurring in academia for cloud robotics.

2024-08-12​

This meeting, the group took a look at progress on the Cloud Robotics Hub website, then agreed tasks to split between themselves to get the site closer to publishing.

2024-07-29 Talk: ROS Tool (Christian Fritz)​

This meeting, the group got a first look at the upcoming Cloud Robotics Hub website, then heard about rostool from group member Christian Fritz of Transitive Robotics.

from Open Robotics on Vimeo.

2024-07-15​

This meeting was the first meeting following the new format. The group members shared news about the upcoming Cloud Robotics Hub site and discussed methods of measuring latency between sending commands and the robot responding.

No meeting recording is available for this meeting.

2024-07-01​

In this meeting, we had a discussion about the purpose of the working group going forwards. We decided to change the meeting format to focus less on group member actions and more on being a space for cloud robotics enthusiasts can share news with each other, with more guest speakers.

No meeting recording is available for this meeting.

2024-06-17​

We hosted a guest in this meeting, with Gui Manzato from Ekumen talking about his experience working with all layers of the robotics stack and contributing back to ROS and open source software.

No meeting recording is available for this meeting.

2024-06-03​

This meeting was used to continue processing results from the State of Cloud Robotics Survey.

from Open Robotics on Vimeo.

2024-05-20​

This meeting, we continued to process our survey results, and created an initial set of results to share with the community. The resulting LinkedIn post is available here.

No meeting recording is available for this meeting.

2024-05-06​

This meeting was the first meeting we started to use to process our survey results.

from Open Robotics on Vimeo.

2024-04-22​

We used this meeting to continue drafting the questionnaire from the previous meeting.

from Open Robotics on Vimeo.

2024-04-08​

We used this meeting to discuss how to gather data from folks working with cloud robotics. We agreed to gather data using a public questionnaire and began drafting it. The draft is available here.

No meeting recording is available for this meeting.

2024-03-11​

In this meeting, we discussed our long-term strategy and built a set of slides that laid out that strategy. The slides are available here.

from Open Robotics on Vimeo.

2024-02-26 Talk: Asimovo (Christine Fraser)​

This was our first meeting as a community working group. We introduced ourselves to each other, then had a presentation from Christine Fraser and Ludo Stellingwerff from Asimovo.

from Open Robotics on Vimeo.