How Rust Is Transforming Robotics Control Systems – An Inside Interview

Rust how changes robots: in about nine months we wrote the entire facility control system from scratch using Rust, producing a 100,000‑line controller without any unsafe C.

We built a complete 10‑year‑scale factory controller in Rust.

We never used unsafe C.

The interview with Carter Schultz, robot architect at AMP Robotics, covers his background, the company’s mission in recycling, and his view on how Rust fundamentally changes typical robot architecture.

Education and Early Career

Carter became interested in robotics through high‑school competitions, earned a mechanical engineering degree, and later worked on launch‑vehicle hardware at SpaceX, where he experienced integration bottlenecks caused by siloed mechanical, electrical, and software teams.

Joining AMP Robotics

He joined AMP after being referred by a colleague, helped build the first data‑labeling pipeline for recycling frames, and contributed to early infrastructure for object classification.

Switch to Rust

Disappointed with C++, Carter explored Rust as a safer alternative. AMP decided to use Rust for a new greenfield recycling facility, requiring a fault‑tolerant control system that communicates with dozens of subsystems and hundreds of devices.

After a successful nine‑month effort, Carter presented the project at RustConf 2023 and became a Rust evangelist, now questioning how quickly they can replace remaining C++ code.

ROS and Microservices

Carter describes ROS as a microservice framework with a message bus, enabling language‑agnostic inter‑process communication. AMP’s codebase was originally 40% Python and 60% C++, both supported by ROS. He emphasizes rewriting microservices incrementally and the performance gains of moving from Python to C++.

He also discusses the ROS‑to‑Rust interface library roslibrust, the challenges of ROS 1’s custom communication protocol, and the industry shift toward ROS 2, DDS, and the Rust‑based Zenoh middleware.

Future Outlook

While a full Rust rewrite of a robot stack faces obstacles such as vendor driver code written in C++, Carter envisions a future where camera drivers, motor controllers, and path‑planning libraries are all Rust, reducing overhead, simplifying debugging, and improving safety.

Advice for Aspiring Robotics Engineers

Learn ROS, build your own robots from CAD to hardware, gain hands‑on experience, and create a portfolio to showcase projects; a broad understanding of both software and mechanical aspects makes engineers more valuable.