Courses
Robotics: Aerial Robotics: How can we create agile micro aerial vehicles that are able to operate autonomously in cluttered indoor and outdoor environments? You will gain an introduction to the mechanics of flight and the design of quadrotor flying robots and will be able to develop dynamic models, derive controllers, and synthesize planners for operating in three dimensional environments. You will be exposed to the challenges of using noisy sensors for localization and maneuvering in complex, three-dimensional environments. Finally, you will gain insights through seeing real world examples of the possible applications and challenges for the rapidly-growing drone industry.
Robotics Tools – Systems
ROS is robotics middleware. Although ROS is not an operating system, it provides services designed for a heterogeneous computer cluster such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.
ROS2 is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. From drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms, and with powerful developer tools, ROS has what you need for your next robotics project. And it’s all open source.
Robotics System Toolbox provides tools and algorithms for designing, simulating, and testing manipulators, mobile robots, and humanoid robots. For manipulators and humanoid robots, the toolbox includes algorithms for collision checking, trajectory generation, forward and inverse kinematics, and dynamics using a rigid body tree representation. For mobile robots, it includes algorithms for mapping, localization, path planning, path following, and motion control. The toolbox provides reference examples of common industrial robot applications. It also includes a library of commercially available industrial robot models that you can import, visualize, and simulate.
Intel Robot DevKit is the tool to generate Robotics Software Development Kit (RDK) designed for autonomous devices, including the ROS2 core and capabilities packages like perception, planning, control driver, etc. It provides flexible build/runtime configurations to meet the different autonomous requirements on top of diverse hardware choices, for example, using different hardware engines CPU/GPU/VPU to accelerate AI-related features.
Robotics Tools – Simulation and Visualizations
MoveIt is the most widely used software for manipulation and has been used on over 100 robots. It provides an easy-to-use robotics platform for developing advanced applications, evaluating new designs, and building integrated products for industrial, commercial, R&D, and other domains.
Gazebo accurately and efficiently simulates indoor and outdoor robots. You get a robust physics engine, high-quality graphics, and programmatic and graphical interfaces.
CARLA is an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions.
ROS bridge is a package to bridge ROS for CARLA Simulator.
AirSim is a simulator for drones, cars and more, built on Unreal Engine (we now also have an experimental Unity release). It is open-source, cross platform, and supports hardware-in-loop with popular flight controllers such as PX4 for physically and visually realistic simulations.
Open-source Projects
FAST-Dynamic-Vision is a neuromorphic visual perception system for detection and tracking of dynamic objects with event and depth sensing.
The JPL Open Source Rover is an open source, build it yourself, scaled down version of the 6 wheel rover design that JPL uses to explore the surface of Mars. The Open Source Rover is designed almost entirely out of consumer off the shelf (COTS) parts. This project is intended to be a teaching and learning experience for those who want to get involved in mechanical engineering, software, electronics, or robotics.
AWS DeepRacer autonomous Car Kit: Developers of all skill levels can get hands-on with machine learning through a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, and global racing league.