Reading Room
The Fictionlab Blog
Explore a mix of technical guides, industry insights, and stories from inside our Robot house. Whether it’s engineering deep dives, business analysis, or the history behind our rover competitions, this is where we share our knowledge and culture.
Buying a Research Robot With Grant Money: Procurement, Lead Times, Shipping and VAT
Buying a research robot with grant money: what to put in the RFQ, lead times to confirm, shipping, Incoterms and…
Read more Benchmarking Perception Workloads on a Rover: Jetson Orin Nano vs Raspberry Pi 5
Jetson Orin Nano vs Raspberry Pi 5 on one rover: throughput, latency, power draw and cost per frame for object…
Read more From rosbag to Dataset: Building an ML Training Pipeline From Field Recordings
Turn field rosbag recordings into an ML training dataset: time-aligned frame extraction, anonymisation, labelling, splits by session and versioning of…
Read more How to Run a Repeatable Outdoor Field Test: A Protocol You Can Cite
A citable protocol for repeatable outdoor robot field tests: route definition, initial conditions, run count, logged variables and clear criteria…
Read more When SLAM Drifts: Diagnosing Loop Closure Failures on a Real Rover
Five common causes of SLAM drift and loop closure failure on a real rover, how to confirm each one from…
Read more Docker on Robots: When Containers Help and When They Quietly Hurt Performance
When Docker helps on a robot and when it quietly hurts: GPU and device access, DDS networking, boot time on…
Read more Migrating a Production Robot From ROS 2 Humble to Jazzy: A Field Report
Migrating a production robot from ROS 2 Humble to Jazzy: what broke, how long it took, a parallel-workspace strategy that…
Read more Fusing GNSS, IMU and Wheel Odometry With robot_localization: A Working EKF Config
A working robot_localization setup fusing GNSS, IMU and wheel odometry: two EKF instances, navsat_transform, covariance choices, a commented YAML and…
Read more Wi-Fi, LoRa or LTE: Choosing Comms for an Outdoor Robot
Wi-Fi, LoRa or LTE for an outdoor robot? Range, bandwidth, latency, power and cost compared, plus why most field deployments…
Read more Teleoperating a UGV Over LTE and 5G: The Latency Budget Nobody Publishes
Where the milliseconds go when you teleoperate a UGV over LTE or 5G: a stage-by-stage latency budget, what drives acceptable…
Read more From Prototype to Small Series: What Actually Changes in Custom Robot Development
What really changes when a robot prototype becomes a small series: long-lifecycle components, procedural assembly, controlled documentation, acceptance testing and…
Read more Writing a URDF for Your Own Chassis: From CAD to a Robot ROS 2 Understands
Turn your own chassis CAD into a URDF that ROS 2 understands: links and joints, inertias, collision meshes, reusable xacro…
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