Introduction

Welcome to Learning copper-rs, a hands-on guide to building robots with the Copper deterministic robotics operating system.

Most people learn Rust with the amazing Rust Book, so we built it for copper-rs.

This book has been written with the help of AI, for the sake of speed, proper grammar and formatting, but each and every line has been reviewed by a human.

The source for this book is available on GitHub. Feedback and contributions are welcome.

This book will take you from zero to a running Copper project, one concept at a time. By the end, you’ll understand how to define task graphs, write sensor drivers and processing pipelines, and run everything with sub-microsecond deterministic scheduling.

Who is this for?

This book is aimed at:

• Robotics developers coming from ROS / ROS 2 who want to explore a Rust-native alternative
• Rust developers interested in robotics and real-time systems
• Beginners who want a gentle, progressive introduction to Copper’s architecture

No prior Copper experience is required. Familiarity with Rust syntax is helpful but any experience with other programming language should allow you to get through.

Let’s get started!