External Course Materials and Teaching Resources

External Robotics Course Materials

The Art of Grasping and Manipulation in Robotics - An on-line course that introduces the principles and the mechanisms that govern human and robotic grasping, with a focus on practical examples and open research challenges. Lecturers: Domenico Prattichizzo, Monica Malvezzi, Maria Pozzi

ROS Courses Wiki - Links to a number of internal and external course materials sites focusing on courses that utilize or teach ROS, the Robot Operating System.

ROS Tutorials and Examples - A number of excellent ROS tutorials, demos, and resources, provided by Clearpath Robotics.

Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) - an organization dedicating to applying and evaluating robots as a context for computer science education.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere - Links to course materials for some of Stanford's Engineering courses, including lecture videos. Includes 'Introduction to Robotics' by Prof. Oussama Khatib

Cognitive Robotics Course at CMU - Materials for Carnegie Mellon course 15-494, "Cognitive Robotics" taught by Dave Touretsky. Uses Chiara robot hardware and Tekkotsu software packages linked below.

Free Robotics Texts

A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation - Free first edition of the textbook by Richard M. Murray, Zexiang Li and S. Shankar Sastry

Planning Algorithms Textbook - A free textbook by Steven M. LaValle on many of the planning problems encountered in robotics.

Introduction to Computer Science via Robots - A free textbook by the Institute of Personal Robots in Education

Robotics Link Sites and Message Boards

Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE) - an organization dedicating to applying and evaluating robots as a context for computer science education.

Lugnet - Message board for Lego users and enthusiasts. Includes Lego robotics. Very well organized/archived.

Robot Cafe - Well organized robotics directory. Includes various software, hardware and robotics competition links.

Robotics Hardware

Open Robot Hardware - A site that hosts and links to open source robotics hardware projects.

E-Puck - Open-hardware, education oriented, mobile robot developed by EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland)

Lego Mindstorms - Lego sets with programmmable bricks. Can be used with a variety of programming languages including: C/C++, Java, Python, VB, Labview.

Handyboard - 6811-based microcontroller system that lets build mobile robots for educational, hobbyist, and industrial purposes.

Make Controller Kit - Open source hardware solution for hobbyists and professionals with numerous robotics applications. Supports desktop interfaces via a variety of languages including: Max/MSP, Flash, Java, Python, Ruby and anything that supports OSC.

Chiara Open Source Educational Robot - Open source educational robot hardware solution - "Laptop with Legs". Also provides designs for iRobot Create platform and planar hand-eye system for use with Tekkotsu software platform listed below.

Robotics Software and Libraries

OpenRave - Open-source, cross-platform, plugin-based robot planning architecture that serves as the center of all planning and execution. Includes services like collision detection, robot kinematics, physics, robot controls, and a network scripting environment.

Pyro - Pyro is a project designed to create an easy-to-use interface for accessing and controlling a wide variety of real and simulated robots.

RobotML - An experimental XML-based markup language that is used for communication between autonomous mobile robots and robot components.

Player Project - A project to create free software for research into robotics and sensor systems. Its components include the Player network server and Stage and Gazebo robot platform simulators. These run on POSIX-compatible operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and the BSD variants.

RubiOS - A Java based open source communications API for Social Robots.

ARIA -Open source robot API libraries compatible with pioneers, peoplebot, seekur, amigobot, powerbot and other robots; programmable with Java, C++, Python under WIN/Linux. Provides tools to integrate I/O with your own custom hardware

CLARAty - Collaborative effort among NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Minnesota to promote reusable robotic software. Designed to support heterogeneous robotic platforms and integrate advanced robotic capabilities from multiple institutions.

ERPS - A commercial robotics software development kit.

Experimental Robotics Framework - Addon for Player/Stage that support multiple robot experiments in 3d.

MARIE - MARIE is a free software tool using a component-based approach to build robotics software systems by integrating previously-existing and new software components.

Microsoft Robotics Studio - Uses a component based approach. Each component is a service. Services are orchestrated through a concurrency library called the CCR. Current version (1.5) includes a Microsoft XNA-Framework based simulator with physics simulation and a Visual Programming Language.

MRPT -The Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit is an open-source set of C++ libraries and applications which cover grabbing, visualizing and manipulating datasets, particle filter and Kalman filter-based SLAM, linear algebra, robotics sensors and MATLAB-like plot rendering.

OpenJaus - An open-source component based approach that uses standarized messages and transport methods to create interoperable robotic systems.

ORCA - an open-source framework for developing component-based robotic systems. It provides the means for defining and developing the building-blocks which can be pieced together to form arbitrarily complex robotic systems, from single vehicles to distributed sensor networks. Inter-component communication is implemented using Ice middleware.

Orchestra Control Engine - A suite of software components (based on Linux/RTAI) for the planning, development and deployment of real-time control applications for industrial machines and robots.

OROCOS - Open Robot Control Software project provides a Free Software toolkit for realtime robot arm and machine tool control.

RoboMind - Educational software to learn the basics of robotics and programming

Robot Intelligence Kernel - RIK is a portable, reconfigurable suite of perceptual, behavioral and cognitive capabilities that can be used across many different platforms, environments and tasks. RIK integrates algorithms and hardware for perception, world-modeling, adaptive communication, dynamic tasking, and behaviors for navigation, search and detection.

RoSta - European project robotic software architecture and middleware approaches. It also provides plenty of information on architectural patterns/styles, data logging/storage and catalog of robot software.

Skilligent - Commercial control system for autonomous service robots. The control system enables creation of robots which can be trained by end users - vs. programmed by a software engineer.

URBI - Universal Real-time Behavior Interface

Webots - A commercial robot simulation package that allows physically realistic simulations and allows you to prototype your own robot. It also comes with a broad palette of predesigned robot models, e.g. Aibo, e-puck, khepera, hoap2, hemisson, pioneer, etc.

Parallel Port PWM/Encoder Linux Driver - Cheap alternative for motor control. Allows open/closed loop control of motors using the parallel port.

LDraw - 3D Lego modeling software, as well as libraries of virtually every Lego part ever made.

Tekkotsu - Open source robotics educational software at CMU

RoKiSim - an educational software tool for 3D simulation of six-axis PUMA-type serial robots developed at the Control and Robotics Lab of the ÉTS in Montreal

EulerAngles - an iOS app for representing Euler Angles developed at the Control and Robotics Lab of the ÉTS in Montreal

UC Louvain wheeled robot simulator - Simulation environment for developping autonomous controllers for wheeled mobile robots developed at UC Louvain