Rust on the Field: Integrating Real Autonomous Systems

MOSAIC-UXS is an open, multi-domain UXV orchestration platform developed by Quantum Systems: a Rust backend, a Lit/TypeScript frontend, and gRPC interfaces for integrating any aerial drone, ground robot, surface vessel, or sensor platform. Teams across the defence and public-safety space build their own drivers against it.

Teams build two kinds of connectors in Rust: a CoT bridge, syncing points of interest bidirectionally with an ATAK/TAK client over Cursor-on-Target UDP multicast; and a MAVLink connector, talking to a real or simulated drone/rover over the open ArduPilot MAVLink dialect. Both protocols are public standards used across the robotics and defence industries.

At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Parse and emit Cursor-on-Target (CoT) XML over UDP multicast
• Talk MAVLink v2 to a real or simulated ArduPilot vehicle from Rust
• Handle unreliable, best-effort UDP transports with proper timeouts and retries
• Reason about bridging heterogeneous, open field protocols into a common data model

Comfortable with async Rust and Tokio. No prior robotics, MAVLink, or CoT experience needed. Bring a laptop with a stable Rust toolchain — setup instructions sent ahead of the workshop. Hardware is provided.