Bagel lets you ask questions about robotics, drone, and IoT data in plain English. Every calculation over your message data is DuckDB SQL, not model guesswork, and Bagel shows you the query so you can audit it.

Is my IMU sensor overheating?

Bagel also has an intelligent edge data reduction pipeline: describe an event and Bagel runs the detection on the robot, keeping the windows that matter and dropping the rest. An MCP server puts all of it in your LLM's hands: Claude Code, Gemini, Cursor, or a fully local model.

Bagel was the first MCP server to ship a real analysis toolkit for robotics data, and it keeps the LLM where it belongs: in front of your logs, never in your robot's control loop.

🥯 Key Features

• Ask in plain language: No deep domain expertise needed.
• Transparent calculations: Deterministic SQL queries. No black-box LLM math.
• Natural-language pipelines: "Keep 10s around every hard brake, drop the rest": one sentence becomes an auditable pipeline: previewed before a byte is written, then run once, across a fleet, or standing at the edge.
• Broad LLM support: Claude Code, Gemini, Cursor, Codex, and more.
• Dockerized environments: No local dependencies required.
• Extensible capabilities: Bagel can learn new tricks.
• Wide format coverage: Missing your data format? Open a ticket.

⚡️ Quickstart

[!TIP] Already have Claude Code? Just paste the link to this repo and tell Claude what environment you want:

Set up https://github.com/Extelligence-ai/bagel for ROS2 Kilted.

Claude will clone the repo, start Docker, and wire up the MCP connection for you.

📋 Prerequisites

Install Docker Desktop and Claude Code (or another MCP-enabled LLM).

1. Clone and start Bagel

git clone https://github.com/Extelligence-ai/bagel.git && cd bagel
docker compose run --service-ports ros2-kilted

[!TIP] Port 8000 already in use? Set MCP_SERVER_PORT to something else, for example MCP_SERVER_PORT=8100 docker compose run --service-ports ros2-kilted, and use that port in step 2.

Pick the service that matches your environment:

[!TIP] To give Bagel access to your local files, edit compose.yaml before starting Docker: uncomment and update the volumes section under your chosen service.

Wait for this output:

INFO:     Uvicorn running on http://0.0.0.0:8000 (Press CTRL+C to quit)

2. Connect Claude Code

In a new terminal:

claude mcp add --transport sse bagel http://localhost:8000/sse

[!NOTE] The MCP endpoint is bound to localhost only (not exposed to the LAN) for security. To share it with other machines, drop the 127.0.0.1 prefix in compose.yaml and put an authenticated proxy in front: see SECURITY.md.

3. Prompt

claude

Summarize the metadata of the ROS2 bag "./data/sample/ros2/mcap".

That’s it: you’re chatting with your data.

🔒 Prefer fully offline?

Swap step 2 for a local model: your data and your LLM stay on the machine:

brew install ollama && ollama serve &                                  # or ollama.com
ollama pull qwen3:8b
uvx ollmcp --mcp-server-url http://localhost:8000/sse --model qwen3:8b

Model picks, expectations, and troubleshooting: Local LLMs guide.

🔌 Agent plugins (Claude Code and Codex)

Bagel ships an agent plugin: four skills that teach the agent when and how to drive the server (log triage, pipeline authoring, live sinks, visualization export) plus the MCP connection, wired automatically. The same plugin/ directory serves both Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.

/plugin marketplace add Extelligence-ai/bagel
/plugin install bagel@bagel

Codex and ChatGPT users: install bagel from the OpenAI Plugins Directory (one click), or clone the repo and add it as a plugin marketplace (the repo carries .agents/plugins/marketplace.json). Directory installs bundle the skills only, so also connect the server once in ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.bagel]
url = "http://localhost:8000/mcp"

Repo-marketplace and Claude Code installs wire this connection automatically.

Then start the container for your data format (see Quickstart): the plugin connects to http://localhost:8000/mcp by default. Any other MCP client can discover the same workflows server-side via the list_agent_capabilities tool.

Keep what matters, drop the rest

A robot records more data than you can afford to move. Bagel turns a question into a detector, runs it where the data is recorded, and ships only the windows around real events.

Here it is in one conversation:

The session above: a 20-minute (1,200 s) recording and the prompt "keep 10 seconds before and after every deceleration harder than −10 m/s²". The preview detects 7 events, merges them into 4 windows, and keeps 92 s of the 1,200 (7.6%); the run writes a 2.1 GB bag down to 161 MB. These figures are illustrative demo output, not a measured benchmark: the ratio is event-window duration over total duration, so it depends entirely on your workload.

✅ Supported Data Formats

🆚 Bagel vs. the Tools You Already Use

You already have ros2 *, PlotJuggler, and grep. Bagel doesn't replace them: it answers the questions they make you work for, then hands off to them:

One sentence of plain language, one answer, instead of a pipeline of commands and a script you'll delete tomorrow.

💬 What Can I Prompt?

You can ask Bagel almost anything. For example:

What’s the correlation between current and voltage in the /spot/status/battery_states topic?

I think the robot hit a pothole. Can you check for sudden deceleration on the z-axis to confirm?

Every time the drone decelerates harder than -10 m/s², keep 10 seconds before and after. Drop everything else.

Did anything change on this robot since last week?

Time to put Bagel to the test: can it catch a drone doing barrel rolls? Spoiler: 🎉 It totally can.

💡 How Bagel Works

When you ask a question, Bagel analyzes your data source’s metadata and topics to build a high-level understanding.

Based on your prompt, if further inspection is needed, Bagel identifies the most relevant topics and interprets their meaning and structure. Bagel then writes the relevant topic messages to an Apache Arrow file and uses DuckDB to generate and execute queries against it.

This process is repeated as needed, running new queries until Bagel finds the best answer to your question.

LLMs excel at language but struggle with math. Bagel overcomes this by generating deterministic DuckDB SQL queries. These queries are displayed for you to audit, and you can guide Bagel to correct any errors.

🐶 Teach Bagel a New Trick

Bagel learns new capabilities through POML files: a structured set of instructions that describe a “trick,” such as computing latency statistics.

✍️ Create a .poml file

For example, let’s define ./src/agent/examples/woof.poml.

<poml>
    <task>
        Count the topics in the data source.
        If the count is odd, say "woof", else say "meow".
    </task>

    <output-format>
        Return the sound, the topic count, and a few cute emojis. Nothing else.
    </output-format>
</poml>

🗣️ Use the capability

Prompt Bagel:

Run the POML capability "./src/agent/examples/woof.poml" on the ROS2 bag "./data/sample/ros2/mcap".

Result:

meow 🐱 4 topics 🐱💤🎯

📚 Guides

• Natural-language pipelines · the model: a cadence, gates, and tasks; preview → run → save → batch → standing at the edge
• Event-driven data reduction · detect events, keep windows around them (snippets or one reduced bag), batch across fleets, upload to the cloud
• Live ROS2 robots over rosbridge · a step-by-step tutorial
• ROS text logs · inspect ~/.ros/log errors and warnings without opening a bag
• MQTT · live IoT topics, Sparkplug B, edge recording
• PostgreSQL / TimescaleDB · every table is a topic
• InfluxDB 3 · every measurement is a topic
• Automotive MDF4 & CAN (beta) · channel groups and DBC messages are topics; units ride along
• Local LLMs · fully offline with Ollama: your data and your model never leave the machine

📦 Integrations

• Rerun · "show me that event in Rerun": any time window as a ready-to-open recording
• Lichtblick / Foxglove · event windows as MCAP + pre-framed layouts for either viewer
• PlotJuggler · open Bagel's MCAP outputs directly; one-sentence pre-framed sessions, flattened CSV/Parquet exports
• Cloudini · decode cloudini-compressed pointclouds, or compress a bag's PointCloud2 topics into CompressedPointCloud2
• Slack · pipelines post to your ops channel when they fire: "🚨 hard brake on {asset}"
• LeRobot (beta) · detected events become training episodes: a LeRobotDataset v3.0

🚧 Limitations

Rough edges we know about, so you don't find them the hard way:

• Two formats are beta. The automotive MDF4/CAN readers are verified against files we generate with the same libraries that read them (asammdf, python-can); real CANape/INCA/Vector-produced captures haven't crossed our test bench yet. LeRobot exports load-test clean with the real lerobot package, but no policy has been trained from a Bagel export yet.
• Reduction ratios are workload-dependent, and unbenchmarked. The ratio is event-window duration over total duration: quiet recordings reduce dramatically, eventful ones much less. The figures in this README are illustrative demo output, not a measured benchmark.
• No authentication on the MCP endpoint. By design it binds to localhost only; treat it like a database socket and see SECURITY.md before sharing it beyond your machine.
• Small local models struggle with multi-step pipelines. A 4-8B model handles tool selection and simple SQL; event-windowed reduction and multi-topic joins want a bigger model. See the Local LLMs guide.
• Live-database end-to-end tests run outside CI. The InfluxDB and Postgres suites' pure tests run in CI; their live end-to-end cases only execute against an instance you point them at. Everything else, including the ROS bag write paths, runs in CI.

🫶 Contributing

We’d love your help! The easiest way to support the project is by giving it a ⭐ on GitHub.

Other great ways to contribute:

• Request new features
• Report bugs
• Improve documentation
• Add new capabilities

Before contributing, please review the guidelines.

Join the conversation in our Discord server. We hang out there regularly.

📄 License

Bagel is open source under the Apache License 2.0.