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Robustness is a key concern in high-stakes fields like aerospace, automotive, and finance, but achieving it often requires strict processes and specialized tooling. This can be an unnecessary burden for many other domains. Can the Rust programming language make it more achievable for everyone?
This talk explores that question through the lens of a real-world Rust project: a system responsible for controlling fleets of autonomous mobile robots. While Rust's memory safety is a great start, its true power lies in the type system and its ownership rules. The session will go beyond memory safety and explore ways to encode behavior and protocols directly into types.
While the code and techniques are specific to Rust, the underlying design philosophy is broadly applicable. This session is therefore not just for Rust developers, but for any engineer curious about these powerful concepts. You will leave with a new perspective on reliability and a concrete example of using the compiler as an active co-pilot to build systems that are robust by design, offering inspiration that can be valuable no matter what language you use.
Interview:
What is your session about, and why is it important for senior software developers? Why should attendees prioritize your session?
My session is about building robust software and how embracing strong type systems can help achieving this goal. I do this through the lens of Rust, providing real-world examples from the software system I have been working on for the last 2 years. Attend this session if you want to learn how to avoid bugs by making them impossible to write in the first place.
What are the common challenges developers and architects face in this area?
Full robustness is usually difficult to achieve and comes as a trade-off with speed, cost and complexity. Furthermore, programming languages add their own trade-offs for robustness, like dropping memory-safety in favour of lower language-complexity or using a weak type system for faster prototyping speed. All this makes it even more challenging to write robust software with reasonable effort.
What's one thing you hope attendees will implement immediately after your talk?
I hope for attendees to start experimenting with a strongly typed language like Rust and for them to try to implement invariants directly through the type system.
What makes InfoQ Dev Summit stand out as a conference for senior software professionals?
InfoQ Dev Summit provides a diverse selection of talks across the whole field of software development.
What does being part of InfoQ Dev Summit mean to you?
I’m looking forward to great sessions and interesting discussions with domain experts from different fields.
Speaker
Andy Brinkmeyer
Senior Software Engineer @arculus, Orchestrating Autonomous Robots with Rust | Previously @Airbus Defence and Space
Andy Brinkmeyer is a senior software engineer at arculus, where he works on autonomous mobile robots and builds robust production systems. Over the past two and a half years, he and his team developed a master control system entirely in Rust to coordinate fleets of autonomous mobile robots, covering everything from low-level graph algorithms for traffic control to a Kubernetes-based simulation infrastructure. Before joining arculus, Andy worked on mission systems for autonomous UAVs, among other projects.
