Introduction to Robotics

The University of Chicago's CMSC 20600 Introduction to Robotics course gives students a hands-on introduction to robot programming covering topics including sensing in real-world environments, sensory-motor control, state estimation, localization, forward/inverse kinematics, vision, and reinforcement learning.

This course is centered around 3 mini projects exploring central concepts to robot programming and 1 final project whose topic is chosen by the students. Each of these mini projects will involve students programming real, physical robots interacting with the real world.

The use of physical robots and real-world environments is essential in order for students to 1) see the result of their programs ‘come to life’ in a physical environment and 2) gain experience facing and overcoming the challenges of programming robots (e.g., sensor noise, edge cases due to environment variability, physical constraints of the robot and environment).