Copper Runtime & SDK

A Rust runtime for building, running, recording, and deterministically replaying static robot task graphs, from Linux to bare metal.

▶ Try Copper in your browser  ·  Build your first app

Why Copper

Already flying, driving, swimming, spacefaring, and powering humanoids.

See It Run

These are the same Copper applications used on physical robots, recompiled for the browser. The simulator runs beside a live view of the Copper task graph and latency.

BalanceBot A self-balancing robot simulation using the application that runs on Raspberry Pi hardware. Source code

Flight Controller A quadcopter simulation using the control stack deployed on STM32H7 flight hardware. Source code

Watch more robots built with Copper in the community showcase, or explore the cross-framework benchmarks.

Build Your First Copper App

Install the latest stable Rust toolchain, then:

cargo install cargo-cunew
cargo cunew hello_copper
cd hello_copper
cargo run

The generated app has a typed source → task → sink graph that prints its first messages and records logs/hello-copper.copper. Start with copperconfig.ron, src/main.rs, and src/tasks.rs; the generated justfile also provides helpers for logs, CopperLists, topology (just graph), the exact generated process schedule (just sched), post-execution timing from the default Copper log (just sched-log), and replay. Host projects also include just pgs-baseline, just pgs-optimize, just pgs-candidate, and just pgs-measure; the starter schedule.ron is a conservative placeholder to tune for the real workload. Project creation asks whether the target is bare metal/no_std and omits PGS scaffolding for that choice.

How Copper Fits Together

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Contributing to Copper

Thank you for helping build a deterministic, production-ready robotics runtime. Contributions of code, components, documentation, examples, and careful bug reports are all welcome.

Choose Where to Start

All community participation is governed by our Code of Conduct.

Set Up the Workspace

Copper’s minimum supported Rust version is 1.96. Install the latest stable Rust toolchain with rustup, then install just and clone your fork:

cargo install just
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/copper-rs.git
cd copper-rs

The Ubuntu development dependencies are documented in support/docker/Dockerfile.ubuntu. Other platforms may require equivalent system packages.

Contribution Workflow

1. Create a branch from master using user/kind/description, for example alex/fix/replay-seek.
2. Make one focused change. Add tests and update documentation or examples where the behavior needs them.
3. Run just from the repository root. It formats the workspace, runs lint and API checks, and tests the std and no_std surfaces.
4. Review the complete diff, then commit with a clear message. Conventional Commits are welcome but not required.
5. Push your branch and open a pull request to master. Explain the problem, the chosen approach, and how you verified it.

The pull request template contains the final submission checklist.

Checks

Prefer the root justfile over copying long Cargo command lines:

Linux is the primary full-workspace gate. macOS is also release-blocking, Windows validates a reduced core surface, and embedded coverage is compile-time rather than hardware-in-the-loop. See Supported Platforms for the public platform matrix.

Workspace checks use support/ci/workspace_excludes.py to read package.metadata.copper. Set ci_exclude_workspace = true to exclude a package on every runner, or ci_exclude_workspace_os = ["macos"] to exclude it on specific runner operating systems (linux, macos, or windows). macOS checks include the portable cu-zed payload and projection code and exclude the native ZED SDK

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