Robotics Fundamentals

Sensors, control systems, kinematics, and the real-time software that drives physical autonomous systems.

Concepts

How a robot perceives its environment and acts on it — the hardware interface between software and the physical world.

The feedback loop that keeps a robot at a target state — proportional, integral, and derivative control, and why all three matter.

The geometry of robot motion — translating between joint angles and the position of the robot's end effector.

How a robot builds a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously figuring out its own location within it.

Why robotics software has hard timing deadlines that general-purpose software doesn't, and how real-time systems guarantee them.

The de facto standard middleware for robotics software — nodes, topics, and services that let components communicate.