Robotics Resources

I've designated this page as a place to dump a lot of robotics or research-adjacent resources that I've found useful in my time as a researcher. I'll do my best to keep it current and updated (last update: 1/27/2024).

Robotics challenges

DARPA Robotics Challenge Very influential DARPA competition designed to evaluate general embodied task achievment including traversing rough terrain, opening a door, turning a valve, walking up stairs, etc. If you have ever seen the compilation of robots falling down, this is where that is from. There are a bunch of papers from all the teams as well as DARPA summarizing the main takeaways, I would point people to Chris Atkeson's DRC page DARPA Subterranean Challenge Another very influential DARPA competition, this time designed for robust autonomy in underground, perceptually degraded environments. Similar to DRC, most teams published technical reports on their frameworks that provide a lot of great insights into what it takes to deploy a team of robots in the real world.

Textbooks

Underactuated Robotics - Russ Tedrake Includes a ton of extremely interesting/useful supplementary resources including recorded lectures, online code snippets, figures, etc Planning Algorithms - Steven M. LaValle A great introduction to robotics and motion planning in general. The book also has a few different recommended routes in the preface depending on your background and what you're looking to get out of the book. Free to download, and bonus points for UIUC alumni Backwards Reachability: A Tutorial - Ali Kuwajerwala and Cathlyn Chen Sort of a textbook, a big collection of notes on backwards reachability along with YouTube videos and example code Robotics Knowledgebase A Wikipedia for Robotics!

Seminars

AirLab Summer School Boot camp for robotcs featuring slides and example code Tartan SLAM Series (Summer 2021) Seminar series on SLAM hosted by the AirLab at Carnegie Mellon Tartan SLAM Series (Fall 2021) Seminar series on SLAM hosted by the AirLab at Carnegie Mellon Tartan Planning Series (Spring 2023) Seminar series on planning hosted by the AirLab at Carnegie Mellon MIT Robotics Seminar Seminar series on robotics hosted by MIT (and uploaded on YouTube) Autonomy Talks Seminar series on autonomy hosted by the Zardini Lab at MIT (and uploaded on YouTube)

Repositories

Python Robotics Ton of introductory robotics concepts/algorithms to play around with in Python Associated ArXiv paper ROS Best Practices Collection of tips/tricks/shortcuts for the ever important Robot Operating System (ROS) SOTA Literature Search Tool from the Auton Lab at Carnegie Mellon that uses a sentence transformer to search for ArXiv papers of interest

General Research Writing

Good Writing - Marc Raibert Some nice technical writing tips from the founder of Boston Dynamics How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab A collection of tips on research and writing from a bunch of MIT AI Lab graduate students. A bit old, but it still has a lot of great info. Documenting your PhD — Keeping Track of Meetings, Experiments and Decisions I liked this short article about good ways of keeping your PhD organized. 10 tips on how we write papers - Edward H. Sargent Another nice short paper on technial writing tips Commonly known, commonly not known, totally unknown: a framework for students becoming researchers This paper introduces the Research Skill Development (RSD) framework, one that I still use when I am formulating research projects The Seven Deadly Myths of "Autonomous Systems" List of insightful myths regarding robot autonomy that the IHMC team encountered during their time in the DRC. Seven Cardinal Virtues of Human-Machine Teamwork: Examples from the DARPA Robotic Challenge List of insightful design principles regarding human-machine teamwork from the IHMC team at DRC Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics It's a bit of an odd time to be a robotics researcher in academia right now. This paper addresses the very difficult task of keeping up with extremely volatile AI landscape as a researcher with some levity The Bitter Lesson - Rich Sutton See the prior bullet! The gargantuan amounts of compute available to train the gargantuan learned models that are in the headlines today suggest that in the long run, the models that take advantage of this compute will always outperform the rest. Rich Sutton wrote a small blog post about this idea here. The Role of the Liberal Arts in Undergraduate Robotics Education - Matt Zucker Interesting technical report about how a robotics educator builds a holistic robotics education through STEM and liberal arts education. You and Your Research - Richard Hamming Transcription of a lecture Richard Hamming gave regarding his relationship with research, his colleagues, his career, etc. It's a bit old, I think that some parts of it are hard to adapt to the current STEM landscape, but I think some small lessons in here are useful

Miscellaneous

Human-Robot Interaction Podcast Great podcast that breaks down a lot of under-discussed parts of robotics and research in general The Robot Brains Podcast Robotics podcast hosted by Pieter Abbeel with some all-star guests like Fei-Fei Li! InControl Podcast Podcast on control topics in general, not just robotics, but a fun structure where you are able to learn about each guest's path through control theory and engineering Soft Robotics Podcast Official podcast from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. I think it was originally designed to largely cover soft robotics, but has since expanded to the whole robotics field Matt Mason's Blog Blog from Matt Mason, previous Director of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and now the Chief Scientist at Berkshire Grey. A cool and interactive way to muse about robotics Robotics Worldwide Mailing List Big mailing list for robotics maintained by KIT in Germany, lots of job postings, PhD + Postdoc listings, calls for papers, etc.