CppCon 2026

To navigate safely, a robot must simultaneously ingest high-frequency sensor data, compute complex spatial algorithms, and publish control commands. Historically, frameworks like ROS 2 have handled this via asynchronous callbacks. However, as autonomous stacks scale, relying heavily on unstructured callbacks can obscure control flow, making state synchronization difficult and robust task cancellation notoriously complex.

This talk explores how to transform unstructured, callback-based architectures in a robotics navigation stack into declarative pipelines using structured concurrency (specifically, C++ Senders and Receivers via stdexec). Attendees will dive into two real-world architectural examples: a collision monitor and a waypoint follower, showcasing readable logic pipelines, thread-hopping between an event loop and a static thread pool, and clean task cancellation.