Schedule

Week 1

  • Lecture on BLDC robot actuators and low-level control of robot joints.

  • ../course-material/lab-1 Introduction to Teensy microcontroller. Mechatronics assembly. Experimenting with PID to move BLDC actuators to desired angles. Moving three actuators simultaneously.

  • Lab 2 - Bad Robot Surgeon Build 3-DOF leader-follower robot arms akin to a surgical robotic system.

Week 2

  • Lecture on forward kinematics of open-chain robots and applications.

  • Lab 3 - Safety Dance (Fall 2021) Program the robot to tell you the cartesian coordinates of the leg for any given position. Staying within a cartesian-space safety box with haptic feedback.

Week 3

  • Lecture on inverse kinematics of open-chain robots and applications

  • Lab 4 - Drawbot Program legs to move to desired locations using inverse kinematics. Finally, drawing images with a robot arm! Task-space impedance control if time allows.

Week 4

  • Lecture on quadruped gaits: e.g. theory behind gallop, walk, trot, etc and associated stability.

  • Lab 5 - Virtual Twin Program the robot to trot using open-loop task-space trajectories. Simulating the robot in PyBullet to design and test code before deploying in the real world.

Week 5

Week 6

  • Survey of topics to explore in the final project including reinforcement learning, computer vision, hardware redesign, human interaction.

  • Google Brain guest lecture.

  • Students brainstorm project ideas, do background research, and determine final project.

Week 7

  • Mini-lectures on any additional material students might find useful for their project.

  • Open lab time to work on final projects

Week 8

  • Students present project prototype

Week 9

  • Open lab time

Week 10

  • Students finish final project and showcase to faculty and Google Brain.

Week 11 (finals week)

  • Students upload code, documentation, and media so that future students / hobbyists can recreate their work.

  • Play with robots!