About this episode

The episode discusses the need for a new real-time operating system in robotics with Guillaume Binet from Copper Robotics.

In this episode, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Guillaume Binet, founder of Copper Robotics, to dig into one of the most overlooked problems in modern robotics: the software stack that runs the robots. Guillaume traces his journey from tinkering with old computers in the 80s and 90s, to telecommunications, to the dot-com era, and finally into more than a decade in robotics, including roles at Trilio, Google, Motional, Argo AI, and as CTO at Skyways building long-range carbon-fiber logistics drones. Along the way, he discovered a recurring gap: while cloud software has matured into a rich ecosystem of tools and frameworks, the software powering real-world robots is still surprisingly broken. That insight led him to start Copper Robotics, where he is building a new operating system and runtime designed specifically for real-time robots. We talk about: Why robots are fundamentally different from cloud services and laptops, and what "real-time" actually means when sensors, perception, and actuation all have to meet a fixed time budget The mismatch between microservice-style architectures (and ROS) and the constraints of an autonomous system that has to react in milliseconds How…

People in this episode

Hosts: Kostas, Nitay

Guest: Guillaume Binet

Topics covered

• robotics
• real-time operating systems
• software stack
• autonomous systems
• cloud software
• deterministic systems

Keywords

• robotics
• real-time OS
• software stack
• autonomous systems
• cloud software
• deterministic operating system
• Rust codebase

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Copper Robotics, Trilio, Google, Motional, Argo AI, Skyways

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