CppCon 2023

Development of real-time software for robots allows for strategic use of compile-time programming techniques to optimize performance, latency, and memory usage. The speaker will present how template metaprogramming, the constexpr family of features, concepts and std::enable_if can benefit robotics algorithms and code through concrete examples. Beyond optimization, the speaker will discuss how these features can also enable many safety-critical checks before run-time. The speaker's goal of this talk is for attendees both in robotics and outside to learn how they may be able to move more of their software's evaluation to the compiler.

The speaker's examples will include common robotics programming tasks like kinematics, collision checking, and cartesian control. Historically, robot-agnostic software for these tasks was written to be compiled once and deployed across numerous robotics platforms. This necessitated hardware description files to be ingested on startup and then verified before operating the robot. These approaches require dynamic memory allocation, run-time polymorphism and other approaches that prevent compiler optimizations, static analysis and are not compatible with real-time operation. For many applications in robotics, however, the requirements of the robotics platform are known well in advance and can be leveraged to generate software heavily optimized by the compiler.