But as they scaled, they hit a fundamental infrastructure challenge common to any company deploying edge devices at customer sites: retrieving video data.

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The operational bottleneck

CompScience's core program requires up to 200 hours of workplace footage from each customer site, analyzed twice a year to generate comprehensive risk reports. This model served their early deployments well. As they grew and set their sights on continuous monitoring at scale, an opportunity emerged: shift from periodic snapshots to continuous monitoring, and from retrospective analysis to real-time hazard detection.

For customer IT managers, getting that footage meant coordinating uploads via USB drives or bulk upload tools. For customer IT managers, uploading 200 hours of video could take three to nine days of continuous operation—requiring active oversight to catch and retry transfer failures throughout.

For CompScience's Customer Success Engineers (CSEs), the operational overhead of tracking video retrieval, verifying file integrity, and managing uploads was significant. Automating data collection would allow CSEs to dedicate more time to safety consultation and less to upload coordination, delivering greater value to customers while enabling faster growth.

As Sean Bailey, a Customer Success Engineer at CompScience, put it: "If you have 200 hours of video twice a year, it's like a walkthrough inspection. What we needed was the equivalent of an inspector on-site." Continuous monitoring would enable rapid feedback loops for improvement, allow customers to track intervention effectiveness, surface emerging hazard patterns early, and enable timely operational changes.

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The Viam-Powered Solution

To realize their vision of proactive safety analytics and hazard prevention, CompScience chose to partner with Viam to accelerate time-to-market while keeping their engineering team focused on the AI and analytics work that differentiates their product. CompScience built the new Video Management System (VMS) on Viam's modular robotics platform, leveraging existing infrastructure components—camera discovery, video storage, and device management—while directing engineering effort toward their unique safety analytics workflow.

Automated Camera Discovery & Connection

When a CompScience VMS device arrives at a customer site, Viam's ONVIF/RTSP discovery service automatically identifies cameras on the network and displays thumbnails of available feeds—eliminating the need for manual network scanning or hunting through camera documentation. For cameras that don't support auto-discovery, administrators can manually enter RTSP addresses as a fallback.

This flexibility matters because CompScience deploys into what Sean describes as "unknown landscapes" at each customer site. They may not know the network topology, camera brands, or security configurations ahead of time. The platform handles this variability without requiring custom integration work for each deployment.

Automated Video Capture & Upload

At the core of the system is Viam's video-store component, which handles continuous local recording and buffering. CompScience built a custom uploader module on top of this foundation that manages the entire upload workflow: scheduled captures at configurable intervals, optional upload windows to respect customer network policies (e.g., business hours only, or overnight when bandwidth is available), multipart uploads for large files, automatic retry logic when transfers fail, and cleanup of local storage after successful uploads.

The result: what previously required up to nine days of coordinated oversight now requires a one-time setup, after which uploads happen automatically on schedule, completing in minutes rather than days. It also enables CompScience to provide daily insights about issues the cameras are picking up, from occupational safety to facility security, and operational efficiencies. Customers can now make targeted interventions to change unsafe behaviors in near-real-time, improving workplace safety and reducing costly claims.

Centralized Device Management

All deployed devices are managed through Viam Cloud, providing CompScience's operations team with centralized visibility into device status, upload logs, and system health across their entire fleet. When issues arise—storage approaching capacity, network connectivity problems, camera configuration errors—they surface early through monitoring dashboards. The CSE team can troubleshoot remotely rather than coordinating on-site visits or walking customer IT teams through complex debugging.

This operational infrastructure enables CompScience to manage 40+ devices across different customer sites today—with significant expansion ahead.

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The Transformation

Customer results

CompScience has deployed devices across manufacturing, retail, and quick-service restaurant sites, with significant expansion underway. Three examples illustrate the operational transformation:

• Food Production: One food production facility estimated that its team spent 20 hours coordinating each manual video export. After deploying the Viam-powered CompScience VMS, video export and streaming became fully automated. The facility eliminated the manual workload entirely, allowing teams to focus on safety outcomes rather than data logistics.
• Thrift World - Multi-location retail: Thrift World deployed the VMS across three store locations with minimal IT involvement. The automated data pipeline schedules uploads during off-peak hours, ensuring business operations remain uninterrupted. The company now receives weekly safety reports that reveal risk patterns invisible in periodic snapshots, enabling targeted interventions and real-time compliance tracking.
• Quick-Service Restaurants: Multiple QSR deployments have benefited from real-time visibility into frontline operations. Real-time alerts surface issues like slip hazards, unsafe food handling behaviors, and back-of-house congestion as they happen, enabling managers to intervene quickly, improve compliance, and maintain consistent safety standards across locations. 

These deployments share a common infrastructure: Viam's camera discovery eliminates manual network configuration, automates capture and upload, removes IT coordination overhead, and centralizes device management, enabling CompScience to scale across dozens of customer sites.

The Technical Reality

Like any production edge deployment, the VMS rollout required iterative refinement. Customer environments vary significantly—different camera configurations, network topologies, and security policies mean that flexible discovery mechanisms and robust retry logic are essential, not optional. The modular platform architecture enabled CompScience and Viam's team to address edge cases as they emerged without requiring architectural rewrites.

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What This Means for Companies with Similar Challenges

CompScience's evolution from periodic to continuous monitoring demonstrates a pattern relevant across edge AI and robotics, whether computer vision inspection systems, service robot fleets, industrial automation at customer factories, construction monitoring, or agricultural robotics. The pattern repeats—distributed sites with unknown networks, IT teams with limited bandwidth for operational overhead, inconsistent infrastructure requiring flexible fallbacks, and the need for edge processing to enable real-time use cases rather than batch analysis.

CompScience's partnership approach demonstrates how companies with strong engineering teams can accelerate roadmaps by leveraging proven platform components while maintaining focus on their unique value proposition. Viam's platform brought robust device management, automated error handling, and remote troubleshooting—enabling one team to manage dozens of customer sites across varied environments. These capabilities are essential infrastructure as deployments scale across varied customer environments.

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