About this course

Robots are the most interesting machines most people will never be allowed to understand. This course is an attempt to change that.

The problem

Nearly everything good about learning robotics assumes you have already paid an enormous entry fee. The serious textbooks open with matrix algebra. The good online courses start at “you know Python.” The university path puts every interesting idea behind two years of calculus and physics. Below that line there is YouTube, which is often beautiful and entirely passive: you watch someone else build a robot, and you never touch one.

So the shelf holds material you cannot start and material you cannot do. The barrier is not intelligence, and it is no longer cost. The physics engines are free and run in a browser tab. The barrier is that nobody has written the explanation in plain words and put something to play with underneath it.

What this is

A survey course. It goes across robotics rather than down into one corner of it: how robots move, how they sense, how they are controlled, how they are programmed, how they learn. By the end, nothing in robotics should be a total stranger.

Every module has three parts:

• Words. A plain-English explanation, short and jargon-free, written so that a term is never used before it has been explained.
• A video. One curated YouTube segment that covers the same ground from a different angle. Someone has usually already explained the thing beautifully; the job is to find that and point at it.
• Something to play with. A live simulation of a real robot, running in your browser. Drag a joint and watch the arm move. Turn a setting up until the thing shakes. This is the part that makes it hands-on, and no module ships without it.

Who it is for

Self-motivated beginners and career switchers. The beginner has no engineering background at all. The career switcher has a technical job and is looking at robotics as somewhere to go next. They differ in speed, not in what they need explained: both get told what a degree of freedom is before anyone uses the term. When the two conflict, the beginner wins.

There are no prerequisites. A curious fifteen-year-old and a career-switching thirty-five-year-old should both be able to open the first module and get somewhere.

What it will never do

• Nothing measures you. No marks, no tests, nothing to pass and nothing to earn. When you feel you understand a module, you move on. You are the only judge.
• Nothing is locked. Every module is open to anyone at any time. The order on the map is a suggestion, never a gate.
• No hardware, ever. The moment you need to buy something, the door closes on most people. Everything here runs in a browser tab.
• Not a credential. There is nothing to put on a résumé. If that is what you want, this is the wrong place, and we would rather say so.

The simulation is the truth

The robots you play with here are real physics simulations of real robots, not animations. When the words and the simulation disagree, the words are wrong and get fixed. That is what makes this course honest in a way a textbook cannot be. The simulations exist to make an idea land, not to be accurate enough to design against, and the words say so wherever a real robot would behave differently.

Who makes it

This course is written by one person, with modules read cold and driven one at a time before the next is started. It is free and stays free. If it earns your trust, there may be deeper courses later for the people this one has made hungry. Nothing here is bent to serve that.