Gravis Robotics x Foxglove: Zurich Robotics Night
Join us in Zurich for an evening built for the local robotics and physical AI community.
Gravis Robotics and Foxglove are teaming up to get the local robotics crowd in one room for real technical content and good conversation.
Gravis will take the stage on rebuilding a robot's nervous system — moving beyond ROS2 toward a scalable, safety-certifiable open-source stack, while keeping the machine operational at every step of the migration. Foxglove joins on how you keep watch while you rewire a robot mid-run.
Two teams, one belief: robots have to work outside the demo, not just in it.
This is an invite-only evening, and registration is subject to approval. Space at the Papiersaal is limited, so apply early.
Agenda
18:00 — Doors open. Grab a drink, meet the room.
18:45 — Welcome from Gravis and Foxglove.
19:10 — Gravis takes the stage: ‘From ROS 2 to iceoryx2: Rebuilding Middleware Under a Live System.’
19:45 — Live Q&A. Bring your hardest questions.
20:10 — Networking and apéro until 22:00.
Speakers
Benjamin Rippel — Software Engineer, Gravis Robotics. Benjamin tackles high level architecture decisions for the excavators at Gravis, currently dealing with the middleware migration.
Peter Siegel — Software Engineer, Gravis Robotics. Peter works on the perception pipeline architecture and hardware-accelerated edge pipeline deployments for autonomous heavy machinery.
Nicole Roshardt — Software Engineer, Gravis Robotics. Nicole builds and optimizes the software foundations that enable Gravis’ robots to communicate and operate effectively in the field.
Who should come
Robotics and physical AI engineers, founders, and researchers who are eager to push beyond current robotics paradigms — especially anyone who's wrestled with middleware, real-time systems, or getting robots to work in the real world. It's also aimed at the people making the technical calls, like CTOs and tech leads.
Good to know
Food & drinks — drinks all evening, plus a vegetarian and vegan menu.
By train — the venue is in Sihlcity, about 5 minutes from Zürich HB to Zürich Saalsporthalle (SZU Sihltal line, every 20 min), then a short walk. Trams 5 and 13 also stop at Sihlcity.
By car — park in the Parkhaus Sihlcity, right at the venue.
Accessibility — the Papiersaal is on the 2nd floor, reachable by elevator, with step-free access.
Venue — Papiersaal, Kalanderplatz 6, 8045 Zürich (in the old Sihl paper factory).
Sponsors
Foxglove is a purpose-built, modular platform for robotics teams to collect, organize, and learn from vast quantities of multimodal data, creating the data flywheel to safely scale from development to distributed fleets.
Gravis Robotics turns earthmoving machines into robots. We retrofit excavators already working on site with the Gravis Rack and Slate — sensors, onboard compute, and an in-cab interface — bringing real-world autonomy to some of the hardest, messiest environments in robotics.