Howdy - this is a great writeup Christian. There’s only one piece I don’t agree with…
…and as a result, the above capabilities do not exist as commercial-off-the-shelf or open-source modules that robotics companies can use.
In fact, we (Formant) have almost all of what you’ve talked about here already generalized and run in production with many thousands of systems and hundreds of different morphologies around the world. I think you may have actually worked with our head of engineering (Abraham Dauhajre) at Savioke.
As far as we know, there’s also at least Rocos, Freedom Robotics, and inOrbit working on this problem with great-looking capabilities as well.
At a high level, we’re slicing the problem slightly differently than you’re suggesting and focusing exclusively on the data & remote operations infrastructure. Autonomous capabilities (like SLAM & navigation) and application-specific capabilities (like shelf scanning & traffic light detection) are not easily generalized across domain and morphology, and those are typically the pieces that our customers’ or OEM partners’ core competencies are based around.
Slicing the problem that way also makes it quite clear that it’s also our responsibility to go much deeper than you’ve described into data management features like on-demand ingestion, in-app analytics, and collaborative capabilities like timeline annotations and integration with systems like Jira / Zendesk / Slack / etc. You correctly identified that embeddable UX components, real-time APIs, white labeling, customer portals, and other “construction kit”-type capabilities would be a big deal - which it took us until a quarter or so ago to catch up to.
I do wish there were better open source capabilities here, but it’s quite a lot of infrastructure to run, and critically important to the companies relying on it. We do at least try to make it easy on startups by using a consumption-based pricing model, so cost is always easy to control.
I also really like your package management concept. In my experience, there is currently a very anemic ecosystem of robot companies buying individual software modules from each other. We’re working on introducing embeddable apps for interface customizations now, but that’s kind of a different thing.
Here’s a simple observability share link to check out some of our stuff if you’re interested.