Blog: How robots talk: building distributed robots with gRPC and WebRTC

If you’re building any kind of distributed machine, like robots, drones, or IoT devices, two questions come up fast: How do you send structured commands and data efficiently? How do you keep communication resilient when you have an unreliable network? In this article, I’ll share the approach we use at Viam, an open-source robotics platform that combines gRPC for structured RPCs and WebRTC for peer-to-peer streaming. Even if you’re not building robots, the same architectural ideas can help you design more scalable and adaptable systems.