Northwind Robotics — fleet control dashboard
2019 archive — placeholder, refresh in Phase 5. Built a real-time fleet management dashboard for 200+ warehouse robots — WebSocket-driven, sub-100ms latency, with an incident response workflow.
Built for Client 4
The challenge
Northwind Robotics had 200+ autonomous warehouse robots communicating telemetry over MQTT, but their operators were monitoring them through a raw JSON log viewer and a spreadsheet updated every 15 minutes. Robot pile-ups — where multiple bots deadlock at an intersection — were discovered minutes after they occurred, costing 20–40 minutes of warehouse downtime per incident.
The engineering team had attempted a React dashboard but abandoned it when real-time updates caused the browser to freeze. They needed a solution that could handle 200 concurrent WebSocket streams without degrading the operator's UI.
How we solved it
We built a Go-based fanout service that aggregated the MQTT streams and broadcast normalised telemetry over a single WebSocket connection per client. The React frontend subscribed to this single stream and used a virtual canvas renderer (not DOM) for the warehouse map — eliminating the freeze problem entirely.
The incident response workflow let operators annotate a stuck robot, trigger a remote restart, and log the incident — all from the same dashboard. Automated deadlock detection (three robots at the same coordinate for >5 seconds) triggered an alert before a human noticed.
The results
Tech stack
Working with Webtechgen felt like having a senior engineering team on call. We'd hire them again without hesitation.