Docker is built for web. The mental model is that the internet speed is relatively fast, the image is relatively small, and the device you're pulling onto is starting with essentially no data. All three of these assumptions are wrong for robotics:

  - I've had someone in the Docker discord tell me at length that my container shouldn't be bigger than 1GB, which is impossible the moment you pull in CUDA or any ML libraries.

  - Robots pull over 3G/Starlink/slow customer WiFi

  - Robots are edge devices! They have previous related images, they aren't pulling onto a fresh disk like on web.

It's super common to have a layer in your Dockerfile that has several GB worth of dependencies. If you touch one of the dependencies, it thrashes that layer and anything below it. To quote the CPO from a company I left "Anytime anyone looks at the container the wrong way its a 13g dl over a shit cell connection or starlink". It's extra shit because most of the data the robot is pulling, the robot already has in another layer!

Clipper solves this by breaking apart Docker layers and indexing the files within. When you pull an image it will reuse related files in images you already have on your device. This has other side benefits as well, like being able to mount layers as networked filesystems and much more easily being able to run P2P updates.

It's less that robotics needs a different container registry and more that robotics needs a better container transport, and I've built the infrastructure around it for my registry.