Syllabus

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  

 

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