Robo Guild

Starter path · step 00 · 1 evening

Start here

How the learning resources work, what you need on your desk, and the order of things.

The starter path is a reading order, not a course. Nothing here was made by us. Every link points at open material from people who do the work: university courses, textbooks, and the documentation of the robots themselves. Our job is to pick, order, and prune.

What you need

  • A laptop that runs Linux, macOS or Windows with WSL. Robotics tooling is happiest on Linux; macOS is fine for everything up to training; Windows works through WSL.
  • Python 3.10 or newer, Git, and a terminal you're not afraid of. Module 01 makes sure of that.
  • An account on GitHub and on Hugging Face. You'll use both constantly.
  • The Guild's Discord. Joining is free: two questions and a hello. Post a log at the end of every step.

You don't need a robot to start. Modules 01 to 03 and most of 05 and 06 run on a laptop and in simulation. If you're near a node, the Hardware Pool has the real thing.

The order

  1. 01 Programming you'll actually use. Terminal, Git, Python. Skip if you already live in a terminal.
  2. 02 Just enough math. Vectors, matrices, a little calculus and probability. Skip if you can explain what a Jacobian is.
  3. 03 Robotics fundamentals. Frames, kinematics, what a robot arm actually computes.
  4. 04 Your first arm. The SO-101 with LeRobot: teleoperate, record, train, run.
  5. 05 Seeing. Enough deep learning and computer vision to understand what the policy sees.
  6. 06 Learning to act. Reinforcement learning, in simulation, with MuJoCo.
  7. 07 Legs and sim-to-real. Why the duck falls over, and how to make it stop.
  8. 08 Wheels, heads and the wider world. Mobile bases, desktop robots, and showing your work.

How to study

  • Ten hours a week is a good pace. Fewer is fine: steady beats fast, and each step lists its own time.
  • Watch less, do more. Every module has exercises or a build. The build is the point.
  • When you're stuck for more than an hour, ask in Discord with what you tried. Someone has hit the same wall.
  • At the end of each module, post a log: what you did, what broke, what you'd tell yourself a week ago.

Done with this module when: your laptop has Python and Git working, you're in the Discord, and you've introduced yourself.