Registration is now open for CppCon 2023! The conference starts on October 1 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2023!

Leveraging a Functional Approach for More Testable and Maintainable ROS 2 Code

Tuesday, October 3 • 15:15 - 16:15

by Bilal Gill

Summary of the talk:

In the field of robotics, Robot Operating System (ROS) is the de facto middleware of choice across academia and industry. As most code examples in ROS utilize an object-oriented approach, challenges can arise when writing tests for production code due to the boilerplate code ROS introduces, often leading to unexpected bugs or flaky tests. This talk explores ways to mitigate those issues by using a functional approach. By adopting this approach, we can minimize the impact that ROS or other middleware has on your code, preventing it from becoming tightly coupled and brittle.

Attendees can expect an overview of ROS 2 and the conventional programming approach typically associated with it. We'll delve into how tests are usually constructed and pinpoint potential sources of bugs and flakiness. Following this, we will introduce a functional approach to writing test code. By the end of this talk, attendees will learn an alternative method of architecting their ROS 2 code and also understand how this approach can lead to more robust, maintainable, and testable code.