ROSCon India Presentation

The Talk

Presented at ROSCon India on the challenges and lessons learned from building production-grade manipulation systems with ROS2. The talk covered the journey from prototype to deployed product — the architectural decisions, the failures, and the patterns that actually worked when the robot had to perform reliably every single day.

Watch the Talk

Sandhya Vidyashankar & Robin Singh Tomar — Clutterbot Technologies · Watch on YouTube

Key Topics Covered

• Designing a manipulation stack that survives real-world deployment — not just simulation
• The transition from deterministic control pipelines to adaptive planning with MoveIt2
• Managing complexity in multi-node ROS2 architectures under real-time constraints
• Hardware-software co-design: how mechanical limitations shape software architecture
• Lessons from scaling a manipulation team from one engineer to a full squad

Impact

The presentation resonated with the Indian robotics community, sparking conversations about the gap between academic ROS usage and production robotics. It connected practitioners facing similar challenges across different domains — from warehouse automation to consumer robots.