Lectures

Each lecture opens as slides in the browser, with its demos built in. Lectures are added here as they are posted.

  1. Lecture10

    Battery, Power Design, System Design

    Robots as systems of sensors, compute, actuators, and power; how lithium-ion batteries work and how they reached the market; what a BMS does, from protection and balancing to state of charge and health; and how to pick and size a battery for a robot, from drones to docking and swapping.

    Open slides

More lectures will appear here as they are converted.

Interactive demos

Every demo opens as its own short page and runs the same Python script used in class, in the browser, with no install. Each page also has a notebook: cells you can edit and run right there, or download as a Jupyter notebook.

Reading NMEA sentences

Paste or stream GNSS output and see each $GPGGA field decoded: time, latitude, longitude, fix quality, satellites in use, and HDOP.

Open demoRuns nmea_gga.pyNotebook.ipynbLab 1

Latitude and longitude to UTM

Convert a position into UTM easting and northing, see which zone it falls in, and watch the scale error grow away from the central meridian.

Open demoRuns latlon_utm.pyNotebook.ipynbLecture 03

Satellite geometry and DOP

Drag satellites around the sky plot and watch the dilution of precision and the position error ellipse change with their spread.

Open demoRuns sat_dop.pyNotebook.ipynbLecture 04

RTK: fixed, float, and standalone

Compare the scatter of standalone, RTK float, and RTK fixed solutions from the same walk, and tell precision from accuracy.

Open demoRuns rtk_modes.pyNotebook.ipynbLab 2

IMU noise and Allan variance

Simulate a gyroscope with white noise and bias instability, then read the angle random walk and bias off the Allan deviation plot.

Open demoRuns allan_gyro.pyNotebook.ipynbLab 3