Use Case: Autonomous System Development & Operations

This use case illustrates how teams working with autonomous systems can leverage Heex to solve specific data management challenges encountered during development and operations.

Situation

An engineering team develops autonomous systems with multiple sensors generating terabytes of data. During testing, the team discovers intermittent navigation failures but struggles to isolate relevant data from the massive datasets collected.

Challenges

  1. Edge Case Detection: Engineers need to identify rare failure scenarios without manually reviewing all collected data.

  2. Root Cause Analysis: When anomalies occur, the team needs immediate access to the relevant contextual data preceding the event.

  3. Distributed Fleet Management: Testing occurs across multiple physical locations with both connected and disconnected devices.

  4. Development-to-Production Transition: Issues discovered in production need to be reproduced in the development environment.

How Heex Helps

Development Phase

  • Scenario: During algorithm development, a navigation function occasionally produces unexpected path planning outputs

  • Heex Solution: Engineers use RDA to quickly capture data from ROS 2 based systems with instant configuration and no coding required

  • Result: Instead of building custom debug solutions, developers get a “production-time debugger” that captures exactly the data needed for troubleshooting and root cause analysis

Testing Phase

  • Scenario: QA identifies intermittent sensor fusion failures that occur under specific environmental conditions

  • Heex Solution: Engineers customize data capture agents through the SDK to monitor specific parameters and system states

  • Result: The team captures precisely the data needed at the exact moment of failure, including contextual data from before the event occurred

Production Deployment

  • Scenario: Field-deployed systems encounter unexpected obstacles in environments with limited connectivity

  • Heex Solution: The system manages both connected and unconnected use cases by storing events and data locally, then sending data once connectivity is restored (or events only during poor connectivity)

  • Result: Critical operational data is never lost, regardless of network conditions at the time events occur

Continuous Improvement

  • Scenario: The team needs to sieve through terabytes of historical data to identify patterns in rare failure modes

  • Heex Solution: Engineers set up automated processes through CLI and APIs for headless operations that extract valuable data matching specific criteria

  • Result: Analysis becomes manageable as the team works with targeted datasets rather than raw data dumps

Key Benefits

  1. Real-time Insight: Receive real-time notifications with rich captured data when events matching your criteria occur, enabling immediate analysis of production issues

  2. Efficient Historical Analysis: Extract only the valuable segments from massive historical datasets, making analysis dramatically more efficient

  3. Frictionless Integration: Leverage RDA to integrate with ROS 2 based systems instantly without coding, providing debugging capabilities during both development and operation

  4. Customizable Capture: Tailor data capture precisely to your needs through the SDK when standard configurations aren’t sufficient

  5. Workflow Automation: Streamline processes through CLI and API integration for headless operations that fit into existing toolchains

  6. Universal Connectivity: Maintain data integrity across all deployment scenarios, regardless of connectivity status, ensuring critical data is never lost

Outcome

By implementing Heex, the engineering team transitions from reactive, manual data analysis to proactive, automated collection of precisely the data needed for problem resolution. Development cycles accelerate as the right data becomes immediately available to the right team members without excessive storage or processing requirements.