Simple, Safe, Open: Building Your First ROS 2 Rover with Rust and Pixi

Have you ever wanted to build your own robot but felt overwhelmed by the complexity of dependencies, compilers, and unstable C++ code? Then why not use Rust? In this talk, we aim to convince you that ROS 2-Rust allows the creation of a state-of-the-art stack that is simple, safe, robust, memory-safe, and highly-performant, drastically reducing the time spent debugging runtime crashes. We will also show how to take advantage of Cargo, the Rust package manager, to ease dependency management.

In order to demonstrate our postulate, we have open-sourced a repository that allows everyone to create a minimal, teleoperable rover from scratch. This shows how ROS 2-Rust can further reduce the barrier to entry in the world of robotics.

This project also displays how we used Pixi to simplify the entire development workflow, allowing any developer to clone our open-source repository and achieve a fully working, cross-platform ROS 2 and Rust environment with just a single Pixi install command.

Join us to see how this modern toolchain transforms complex robotics projects into an accessible and enjoyable open-source experience. We aim to inspire you to start your own rover project and show that building your first robot is now as simple as that.