This section contains step-by-step instructions to configure telemetry streams between your device and the Formant cloud.

Telemetry data acquisition in Formant is driven by the Formant agent. The agent gathers data from your device and uploads it to the cloud in a process called ingestion.

Telemetry data is available in the Formant app within a few seconds of being ingested by the agent. Realtime data will be discussed in the teleoperation section of this guide.

Formant natively supports ROS data streams. Several pages in this section directly refer to ROS data types, and assume knowledge of ROS. These pages have "ROS" in the title.

ROS data ingestion

ROS is a first-class citizen in Formant. By adding a telemetry stream with a ROS source, you can ingest data directly from ROS without having to write or maintain any additional code on your robot-side application.

Non-ROS data ingestion

You can also ingest data from non-ROS data sources. This may require use of the Formant Agent SDK, a lightweight Python module which triggers data ingestion on your device.

Ingest data without the Formant agent

If you chose not to install the Formant agent to your device, you can still ingest data to the Formant cloud and associate it with your device. This is accomplished through use of the Cloud SDK. For more information, see Ingesting data without an agent.

Getting started

To start ingesting data, refer to the page for your data source:

• Add a ROS topic stream
• Add a ROS localization stream
• Add a ROS transform tree stream
• Add a non-ROS data stream
• Add a video stream
• Add a file tail stream
• Add a directory watch stream