Robotics runtime in the browser (flight controller, WebAssembly)
Details
- External ID
- 47310591
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Robotics runtime in the browser (flight controller, WebAssembly)
- Website domain
- copper-robotics.com
- Launched
- March 9, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 7
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4108241082410824
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I built a small demo showing a robotics runtime executing entirely inside the browser via WebAssembly. The example workload is a simple flight controller hooked up to a small world simulator.The runtime comes from copper-rs, an open-source robotics runtime written in Rust for deterministic workloads. While robotics stacks are often tightly coupled to specific OS distributions and environments, here, the same code runs on microcontrollers (for example this flight controller also compiles for STM32H7 and flies real drones) as well as on desktop OS targets like Linux, macOS, and Windows.The simulator is built with Bevy.The monitoring interface is built with ratatui, mapped to a Bevy surface in the browser (normally it runs in a real terminal).
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- flight controller and robotics runtime in browser
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Developing a deterministic robotics runtime, control loops for flight controller physics, and compiling Rust/Bevy engines to WebAssembly requires deep systems and robotics domain expertise.
What it would actually take: This architecture requires low-level real-time systems programming, typically in Rust or C++, utilizing an ECS framework like Bevy and compiled down to WebAssembly via wasm-bindgen. The critical challenge is building deterministic, hard-real-time control loop algorithms (PID controllers, attitude estimation, state-space representations) alongside physics simulation without garbage collection jitter. It demands specialized domain expertise in aerospace/robotics dynamics, embedded control systems, and WebAssembly performance optimization.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Page loading issues, requires refresh, Demo not loading reliably
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 57 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #39 of 58 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 126 days after the earliest competitor.
- Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) in the browser via WebGPU · hn · 2026-07-29 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Waputer · hn · 2026-04-17 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Codex CLI compiled to WASM running in the browser · hn · 2026-08-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Runnable · ph · 2026-09-10 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- JBR-001 · hn · 2026-09-29 · 99 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Build Web Automations via Demonstration · hn · 2026-01-27 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Sandboxing untrusted code using WebAssembly · hn · 2026-02-03 · 76 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Firefox in WebAssembly · hn · 2026-07-15 · 273 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.