CS223A: Introduction to Robotics ↗16 lectures, ~19 h
Oussama Khatib, Stanford
Recorded years ago and the video quality shows it. The content hasn't aged, because the math of how a robot arm moves hasn't changed. Lecture 1 alone has 769,000+ views.
← all monthsWarm up in the playground: drag a robot arm →Forward and inverse kinematics, the Jacobian and singularities, live as you drag.
Month 2 · ~19 h of video + practice
The robot's body
Your goal this month: understand how a robot arm moves, where its hand is, and how much force its motors need.
This is the part robot learning people skip most often, and it's the part that breaks their policies later.
When a learned policy fails, it's often not the neural network. It's a wrong coordinate frame, a joint limit, or a singularity nobody understood.
month 20/8 · 0%
Watch
What to focus on
- →Spatial descriptions: where something is and how it's turned
- →Forward kinematics: given the joint angles, where is the hand?
- →Inverse kinematics: given where the hand should be, what are the joint angles?
- →The Jacobian: how joint speeds turn into hand speeds. It shows up in almost every robot controller you'll ever read
- →Dynamics: why the motors need different torque depending on how the arm is posed
- →Position and force control, the preview of Month 4
Practice task
Colab notebook coming soonInstall MuJoCo and load the SO-ARM100, the same open-source arm you can optionally build in Month 6. Then:
When your math and the simulator agree on where the gripper is, you understand the robot's body.
Milestone: by the end of this month you can
Get the next checkpoint by email
One topic, one task and one new resource every week.