Self-driving vehicles, as any mobile robots, are complex systems of hardware and software components, each with potentially unique failure scenarios. Ability to quickly respond to suboptimal performance and component failure is key to getting from a prototype to production and then scaling the business.

One of the most popular frameworks for building high-level robotic software, the Robot Operating System (ROS), allows convenient hands-on debugging, but requires additional integrations for remote monitoring.

I’ll give an overview of ROS and the unique challenges of robotic systems, talk about the standard diagnostics capabilities in ROS, and then show how we use VictoriaMetrics and Grafana to greatly enhance observability of our fleet of autonomous trucks.