Ignite

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.