Founded in response to the tragic 2017 Las Vegas shooting, BRINC builds specialized autonomous drones for public safety agencies. Their drones enable first responders to de-escalate dangerous situations and help save lives. Today, BRINC products are deployed by over 700 public safety agencies globally and the company has raised funding from investors including Index Ventures and Motorola Solutions. Additional backers include Sam Altman (OpenAI), Alexandr Wang (Scale AI) and Dylan Field (Figma).
With increased adoption of BRINC’s drones, flight activity and log data have grown rapidly. Analyzing this data has become critical for early issue detection, quick debugging, and accurate performance monitoring. Like many fast-growing robotics companies, the influx of data amplified several challenges:
Traditional tools weren’t designed to handle this kind of data. Building an in-house solution would have required significant time and resources. BRINC needed a platform built specifically for robotics and drones, one that could efficiently ingest, visualize, and analyze complex logs.
BRINC partnered with Roboto to centralize their log data and automate analysis at scale. By adopting Roboto’s unified log platform and its Actions framework, BRINC transformed a fragmented, manual workflow into an automated system for analysis and reporting.
After each drone flight, logs are automatically ingested by Roboto. They are then available for visualization, post-processing, and search, accessible to all engineering teams through a single unified interface. This shift not only accelerated debugging and QA but also laid the foundation for scalable growth and continuous improvement.
“We’re able to diagnose issues much faster now. It takes minutes to hone in on specifically what happened instead of a couple of days.” — Colin Bell, EVP Cloud
Roboto integrates directly with BRINC’s existing cloud infrastructure, allowing them to connect their own S3 bucket for log ingestion. This enabled a fast and seamless onboarding experience with minimal operational overhead.
“Everything was set up in a couple of hours.” — Jon Hoff, Autonomy Engineer
Roboto works directly at the file level and supports multiple formats like PX4 ULog, ROS bags, Linux journal logs, and more (even proprietary formats). BRINC was able to ingest their logs without building custom converters or changing how they record data. Roboto also allows data from different formats to be visualized side by side, creating a unified view across systems. With Roboto’s powerful SDK, engineers can work with logs in Pandas dataframes without having to deal with unpacking, decoding, or inconsistent formats.
Roboto Actions let BRINC automate log analysis with custom checks tailored to their workflow. Every drone coming off the manufacturing line now receives a full, automated quality control check.
“Without using Roboto, QA becomes very labor-intensive... it might take hours per device to verify everything. With Roboto, it takes a couple of minutes and it just runs in the background when the drone’s done flying.” — Walker Robb, VP of Engineering
The QA team can instantly verify GPS signal acquisition, battery health, sensor fusion accuracy and more. Once logs are ingested, Roboto runs the relevant Actions, which output pass/fail tags and record performance metrics that can be tracked over time.
Creating a Roboto Action for QA checks was simple for BRINC engineers. They used Roboto’s Python SDK to efficiently fetch slices of log data into dataframes for analysis. The Action code is now under source control in their Git repository, and any updates to it get deployed automatically to Roboto.
As logs are uploaded, Roboto computes statistics for each signal. Actions then enrich logs with metadata, enabling engineers to search and filter across thousands of flights. With Roboto’s query language, RoboQL, engineers can combine metadata and statistics in a single search - whether through the UI or SDK.
“Roboto makes it a lot easier to organize our data, enrich it with tags and metadata, and search for specific flights. The query tool is really powerful.” — Jon Hoff, Autonomy Engineer
Once search results are returned, they can be visualized immediately in the browser or analyzed further programmatically. This combination of automatic indexing, custom tagging, and flexible querying turns BRINC’s entire log history into a searchable, analytics-ready dataset.
A recent success involved updating the drone’s battery model. Engineers created a Roboto Action to extract power usage from logs across all phases of flight, then aggregated the results using RoboQL to produce a new model for battery estimation. This update significantly improved the accuracy of remaining flight time estimates, enhancing reliability during high-stakes drone operations.
Since adopting Roboto, BRINC has seen measurable improvements across key areas:
Roboto helps BRINC save money by breaking down silos and unifying data access across teams. Engineers from R&D, manufacturing, and field support now work from a single source of truth for flight logs and test results. This shared visibility eliminates redundant work, accelerates troubleshooting, and ensures consistency across the product lifecycle.
“A single RMA can be hundreds of dollars in shipping, parts, and labor costs, so each one Roboto prevents directly saves us real money and keeps our customers operational.” – Walker Robb, VP of Engineering
Beyond internal efficiency gains, Roboto has had a transformative impact on BRINC’s customers. Faster root-cause analysis enabled by Roboto means fewer disruptions to operations. While BRINC’s Safeguard program ensures customers always have a loaner unit if their drone goes offline, Roboto enables the support team to retrieve flight logs directly from the cloud and often diagnose the issue within the same day.
As Colin Bell, EVP Cloud, notes, this rapid turnaround keeps customer fleets more operational and efficient, helping public safety teams avoid unnecessary delays and maintain mission readiness. It also improves the efficiency of BRINC’s loaner fleet by shortening the time units are out of service and accelerating the return of working hardware to inventory. One public safety customer told BRINC that a competitor took over a month to diagnose a simple motor failure on a returned unit.
In the government sector, reliability and responsiveness often matter more than a drone’s flashy features: “With our Safeguard program, customers just want to be operational […] uptime and reliability drive the decision,” says Bell. Roboto plays a central role in delivering that dependability, helping BRINC secure follow-on contracts and stand out in a high-stakes market.
Roboto’s analysis platform has become a cornerstone of BRINC’s engineering operations, fueling rapid growth by transforming previously unwieldy data into actionable insights.
This has created a powerful flywheel effect: each flight generates more data, which Roboto analyzes to surface new insights, accelerating design iterations and leading to better-performing products in the field.
Looking ahead, BRINC is expanding its use of Roboto to unlock even more value from post-flight data, enabling advanced capabilities like anomaly detection and predictive maintenance through signal search.
