Tentative Course Content
Date |
Class Topic |
Lecture Notes & Related Links |
| 01/24/2022 | Class 1: Introduction to the course; What is a Robot?; The anatomy of a robot; Role of intelligence in robotics. | 1. Anatomy of a Robot. 2. 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 |
| 01/31/2022 | Class 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. |
| 02/09/2022 | Class 6: Introduction to optimization. | 1. A quick intro to SGD and its variants. |
| 02/14/2022 | Class 7: Computing inverse kinematics. | 1. Chapter 3 of MLS textbook 2. Section II of Robotic Systems |
| 02/16/2022 | Class 8: A soft introduction to robot dynamics; The robot Jacobian. | 1. Chapter 4 of MLS textbook 2. Section IV of Robotic Systems |
| Part 2: Robot Control | ||
| 02/23/2022 | Class 9: What is control? Building simple robotic controllers (P, PD, PID). | 1. Video on Micro Mouse. |
| 02/28/2022 | Class 10: Diving a little deeper in control. Introduction to LQR. | 1. Formulation of LQR |
| 03/02/2022 | Class 11: Extending LQR to non-linear dynamics. iLQR and DDP. | 1. A nice blog post. |
| Part 3: Sensing and Fusion | ||
| 03/07/2022 | Class 12: Making sense in a noisy world; Introduction to Bayes Rule. | 1. Bayes rule wiki. |
| 03/09/2022 | Class 13: Introduction to filtering: Kalman Filters, Extended Kalman Filters. | 1. KF tutorial. |
| 03/21/2022 | Class 14: Where is my robot? Introduction to localization and mapping. | 1. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. |
| 03/23/2022 | Class 15: Buffer class to account for potential overflow. | |
| Part 4: Planning | ||
| 03/28/2022 | Class 16: Introduction to planning and configuration spaces. | 1. Section III of Robotic Systems |
| 03/30/2022 | Class 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 |
| 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. | |
| 04/18/2022 | Class 22: Imitation Learning. | |
| 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. | |
| 05/02/2022 | Guest Lecture 1: TBA | |
| 05/04/2022 | Guest Lecture 1: TBA | |
| 05/09/2022 | Final Project Presentations | |
Related Courses and Textbooks
- MIT’s introduction to robotics.
- UW’s class on Mobile Robots
- GATech’s class on Mobile Robots
- MLS Textbook
- Kris Hauser’s Robotic Systems