Bridging robotics and systems programming: Why Copper-rs is a game changer

As robotics systems grow more complex, bringing together all types of specialties from algorithm/ML developers, control engineers, to safety engineers, has become increasingly painful, especially when working with large, brittle stacks like C++ and ROS.

This talk shares the journey of building Copper-rs, a Rust first robot runtime to make robotics development simpler, safer, and more predictable. Rust’s mix of performance, memory safety, and fearless concurrency offers a foundation for systems that don’t collapse under their own complexity.

Built entirely in the open, Copper-rs has grown out of the Rust for Robotics community and explores how we can take the openness and collaboration that made ROS successful and bring those values into a new generation of deterministic, Rust-based robotics systems.

The copper-rs project is an Apache v2 project available at https://github.com/copper-project/copper-rs