Session Description
Imagine a 36-ton excavator operating autonomously in the Argentine desert. No operator. No stable internet. No second chances. Just software moving cubic meters of earth, day after day.
Deploying autonomous construction robots at Gravis Robotics turns familiar DevOps problems into extreme ones. Connectivity is intermittent. Observability is spotty. Hardware fails. And mistakes aren’t just outages, they’re safety risks and hit the client’s bottom line immediately.
In this fast-paced 5-minute Ignite talk, I’ll take the audience into a real-world robotic deployment and highlight three DevOps challenges at the edge:
- Deploying software to computers that don’t sit in a data center with a gigabit connection
- Designing systems that survive vibration, dust, water and failure
- Building confidence in safety-critical releases using simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing and manual on-machine testing
While the environment is extreme, the lessons are universal and can help designing more reliable systems. This talk connects proven DevOps practices from the cloud (CI, observability, and resilience) to a setting where “it works on my machine” can move mountains.
Speaker
Platform lead @ Gravis Robotics
Sandro Meier has over 15 years of experience in software engineering at the intersection of hardware and software. Since 2017, he has been deploying autonomous robots into real-world, safety-critical environments, where failures are physical, not virtual. At Gravis Robotics, his team builds the foundations that allow autonomous excavators to operate reliably in remote locations. His work focuses on applying proven DevOps practices (CI/CD, observability, and resilience) to robotic systems that must withstand harsh environments and zero-downtime expectations. Sandro believes that high-performance robots are built on the same principles as high-performance software systems: A solid platform as a foundation and high quality software craftsmanship on top.
