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Course Content

DateLectures and HomeworksRelated Links
01/06/2022HW-0 ReleaseLink to HW 0
Other useful links:
1. Learn Git
2. Linux Terminal Game
3. Learn Shell
4. Linux Journey
1/24/2022 Class 1: Introduction to the course
  • What is a Robot?
  • The anatomy of a robot
  • Role of intelligence in robotics
1. What is a Robot?
2. Anatomy of a Robot.
3. Isaac Asimov's Robot Series

Part 1: Rigid Body Mechanics

01/26/2022 Class 2: Introduction to robot geometry; What is a link, joint, and actuator?; How do we mathematically model a robot?1. Chapter 1 of MLS textbook
01/31/2022Class 3: A robot as a transformation mechanism; Introduction to rotations, translations, and homogenous transforms.1. Chapter 2 of MLS textbook
2. A nice blog post on Mecharithm.
02/02/2022 Class 4: From positions to velocities; Taking derivatives of robot transforms.1. Chapter 2 of MLS textbook
02/07/2022 Class 5: Computing forward kinematics; Examples of forward kinematics on manipulators and mobile robots.1. Chapter 3 of MLS textbook
2. Forward kinematics of a variety of robots.
3. CH3 of Forward Kinematics
02/09/2022 Class 6: Introduction to optimization.1. A quick intro to SGD and its variants
02/14/2022Class 7: Computing inverse kinematics.1. Chapter 3 of MLS textbook 2. Section II of Robotic Systems
02/16/2022Class 8: A soft introduction to robot dynamics; The robot Jacobian.1. Chapter 4 of MLS textbook 2. Section IV of Robotic Systems
02/16/2022HW2 released. HW1 due.

Part 2: Robot Control

02/23/2022Class 9: What is control? Building simple robotic controllers (P, PD, PID).1. Video on Micro Mouse
02/28/2022Class 10: Diving a little deeper in control. Introduction to LQR.1. Formulation of LQR
03/02/2022Class 11: Extending LQR to non-linear dynamics. iLQR and DDP.1. A nice blog post.
03/02/2022HW3 released. (HW2 due.)

Part 3: Sensing and Fusion

03/07/2022Class 12: Making sense in a noisy world; Introduction to Bayes Rule.1. Bayes rule wiki
03/09/2022Class 13: Introduction to filtering: Kalman Filters, Extended Kalman Filters.1. KF tutorial
03/11/2022HW3 due.
03/21/2022Class 14: Where is my robot? Introduction to localization and mapping.1. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.
03/21/2022HW4 released.
03/23/2022Class 15: Buffer class to account for potential overflow.

Part 4: Planning

03/28/2022Class 16: Introduction to planning and configuration spaces.1. Section III of Robotic Systems
03/30/2022Class 17: Building a heuristic planner: A*1. Section III of Robotic Systems
04/04/2022 Class 18: Planning in high dimensions using sampling based planners (RRT)1. Section III of Robotic Systems
04/04/2022HW5 released. HW4 due.

Part 5: Trajectory Optimization

04/06/2022 Class 19: Making the plans executable; Practical considerations.1. Section III of Robotic Systems
04/11/2022 Class 20: Viewing the entire trajectory generation process as an optimization procedure.1. Section III of Robotic Systems

Part 6: Advanced Topics

04/13/2022 Class 21: Model Predictive Control.1. Section III of Robotic Systems
04/18/2022 Class 22: Imitation Learning
04/18/2022HW5 due.
04/20/2022 Class 23: Reinforcement Learning with Policy Gradients.
04/25/2022 Class 24: Simulation to Real learning.
04/27/2022 Class 25: Computer Vision for Robotics.
05/02/2022Guest Lecture 1: TBA
05/04/2022Guest Lecture 2: TBA
05/09/2022Final Project Presentations.
  1. MIT OCW Introduction to Robotics

  2. UW Mobile Robots

  3. MLS textbook

  4. Kris Hauser's Robotic Systems draft