Listen to this article

Foxglove’s beta 3D panel inside its Foxglove Studio. | Source: Foxglove

Foxglove announced that it’s rolling out a new beta version of its 3D panel for its development platform Foxglove Studio. The panel has more performant and responsive features that are easier to use than the studio’s previous 3D panel. 

The new panel renders a range of poses, point clouds and other visualization markets to create a picture of what a robot encountered in the real world. Knowing what your robot sees is critical for robotics development. 

The new panel’s topic tree and setting editor have been built into the sidebar of the studio to allow users to maximize the amount of space to work with their 3D data. Users can access the panel by selecting the 3D (Beta) option on the studio’s sidebar. 

Foxglove Studio is an open source visualization and debugging platform. The studio comes with ROS 2 support and an extension API. 

The company began as a branch of Webviz, a browser-based visualization tool developed at Cruise. The company open sourced the tool in 2019. Foxglove’s founders, Adrian Macneil and Roman Shtylman, noticed during their time at Cruise how few off-the-shelf tools existed for robotics, and started Foxglove in 2021.

For many robotics companies, all tooling needs to be made in house, which can be expensive and time consuming. The company was founded to fill in this gap and create robotics development tools that could help accelerate robotics development.

The company’s second product offering, the Foxglove Data Platform, is a data managing solution for robotics. The product aims to help roboticists better manage the large amounts of data that comes with robotics. 

Foxglove’s founders saw that the industry lacked solutions that could handle the amount of data robotics required. Some roboticists had resorted to simply passing around external hard drives for collaboration. 

Foxglove won a 2022 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award for the Foxglove Studio and Data Platform. 

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Adrian Macneil, was recently a guest on The Robot Report Podcast. Macneil discussed the company’s spin-out from autonomous driving company Cruise, how its solutions differ from RViz, challenges of robotics development and the keys to running his startup. Foxglove recently raised $3.7 million in Seed funding.