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 Copper builds a statically described, deterministic operating system around your robot, with a scheduler tailored to the exact shape of the system
- Running the same Rust codebase across heterogeneous compute, from Linux hosts to bare-metal MCUs, with a single self-contained executable
- Why TCP/IP is usually the wrong answer inside a robot, and how to think about latency, bandwidth, and dropped data in a real-time context
- The trade-off between compile-time and runtime flexibility, and where Copper draws the line versus ROS
- Safety certification for autonomous systems (ISO 26262, aerospace, medical) and why 100% deterministic replay is a game-changer for proving that what you tested in simulation is what runs on the robot
- The community forming around Copper: students, new robotics startups, and teams who have already "hit the wall" with existing tooling
- A fun detour into restoring 80s and 90s computers, floppy disks, and the lost art of magnetic media
If you have ever wondered why we see so many incredible robot demo videos but so few robots actually deployed in the real world, this conversation is for you.
Learn more about Copper Robotics and join the community via their open source project and Discord.
