Simulate Before You Move: Building Open-Source CI/CD Pipelines for Autonomous Systems

Deploying autonomy directly on hardware is slow, risky, and expensive. Single edge cases or timing bugs can cause sudden physical failures.

In this session, we'll show how to apply ‘shift-left’ testing and CI to autonomous systems by decoupling decision loops from hardware using a deterministic, simulation-based sandbox built with open-source tools.

 Learn how to mock high-frequency sensor streams (distance sensors, proximity matrices, spatial positioning) and feed them into asynchronous reactive control loops. Then we’ll containerize these sandboxes, run them headlessly, and orchestrate them in CI/CD (GitHub Actions/GitLab CI) so teams can automatically stress-test navigation algorithms on every git push. Attendees leave with a practical blueprint for automated, hardware-free integration workflows for robotics. 

• Architectural Decoupling: Learn how to isolate autonomous logic from physical hardware drivers so your code can be fully tested on standard local development machines. 

• Deterministic Mocking: Discover how to mock real-time sensor streams and sync simulation clocks to guarantee perfectly repeatable test runs for reliable debugging. 

• Hardware-Free DevOps: Master how to containerize headless virtual sandboxes and orchestrate them inside CI/CD pipelines to automatically validate autonomous algorithms on every git push.