Lost in translation?! Robotics with type-safe coordinate systems

By Maximilian Schmidt

Talk - Thursday, 18 September
14:45

In robotics, mixing up coordinate frames can silently break systems and cause hard-to-debug behavior. In this talk, we present a Rust crate designed to make these kinds of errors impossible by encoding coordinate frames directly into the type system. We walk through how this works, how we achieve zero runtime overhead and improve code clarity. We ground the talk in our real-world use case: Robot soccer. If you’re interested in building safe robotics systems or just enjoy creative uses of Rust’s type system, this talk is for you.

Speaker

Maximilian Schmidt

Maximilian is a research assistant and PhD student at the Hamburg University of Technology, focusing on advancing robust model generation of cyber-physical systems. His expertise and passion for cutting-edge software development have shaped the HULKs’ approach to autonomous robot soccer and research in humanoid robotics. Since joining the HULKs in 2017, he has taken on key roles, including development lead and board member. Maximilian has been a driving force behind the team’s technological evolution, notably initiating the transition from C++ to Rust. He is also one of the core authors of the HULKs’ current Rust-based framework.