Robotics fundamentals

This is the module that turns a pile of servos into a robot in your head. Two free textbooks, both with videos, both written by people who built the things.

Do this

• Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control (Northwestern, Lynch and Park; free book, videos and code). Chapters 2 to 6: configuration space, rigid-body motion, forward and inverse kinematics, velocity kinematics. The Coursera specialisation can be audited free if you want the structure.
• Robotic Manipulation (MIT, Russ Tedrake; free textbook with notebooks). Chapters 1 to 4: this is where you first see a real arm, in simulation, doing something useful, with the maths visible. Tedrake's course is the single best thing on this list.
• MuJoCo overview. Read it once now so the simulator in module 06 isn't a stranger.

Build

Model a 5-joint arm like the SO-101 in Tedrake's notebooks or in plain NumPy. Compute where the gripper is for a set of joint angles. Then do the reverse with a numerical solver. If you're near a Hardware Pool node, measure the real arm and compare.

Skip

• Dynamics (Modern Robotics chapter 8) on the first pass. Come back when the duck needs it.
• Classical control theory beyond a PID loop, for now.

Done when: you can draw the frames of an arm, write its forward kinematics, and explain why inverse kinematics has more than one answer.