Resources of Learning Robotics

Sep 1, 2023

A quadrupedal robot jumping in the air

Math Basics

Modern Robotics: Rigid body models of robots, kinematics, dynamics, planning, and control (practical views and techniques of control). Kevin has his recorded video lectures on Youtube. All-in-one quick and comprehensive intro to robotics. What else: RBDL and Floating based systems (this note is useful).
Underactuated Robotics, by Russ Tedrake. His lecture notes are updated very often. You can see lots of techniques in terms of optimization-based approaches for motion planning and control there. Be ready to get overwhelmed. Also, many interesting toy examples.
Robotics Handbook. Well, it’s always good to know what’s going on in robotics as a whole. People in this community have put lots of effort into this. A student may just want to start looking at certain chapters in that book. It’s not free/cheap though.

[Legged robots that balance], by Marc Raibert. Many great ideas about controlling legged robots were there. They also have a published report somewhere.
[Feedback Control of Dynamic Bipedal Robot Locomotion], it is probably important to know basic nonlinear control theory so that it is possible to appreciate what the authors presented. Jessy has some example code on his website about planner walking systems. It would be a good starting point for beginners to learn a control-theoretic perspective on bipedal robotic locomotion.
[Humanoid Robotics: A Reference]. As the name of the book indicates, it’s a reference, a good one.