Teaching and Outreach
Our team takes a big-picture, interdisciplinary, integrative view towards education. We are in the process of developing two texts:
Renaissance Robotics: agile design, coordinated response, & multithreaded behavior (hereafter, NR), and
Numerical Renaissance: simulation, optimization, & control (hereafter, RR).
Part 1 of RR (designed for students in high school and beyond) aims to provide an accessible, engaging, and motivating introduction to multi-threaded linux-based robotics. Part 2 of RR (designed for college and beyond) provides high school students with a glimpse of the empowering STEM subjects that lie ahead, and the compelling things that can be done once they are mastered, and provides college students with a focused guide to several advanced courses in dynamics, controls, circuits, and numerical methods, unified by the motivating challenge of developing advanced robotic systems and motion planning algorithms.
The presentation in RR is followed up by the interdisciplinary presentation in NR (designed for grad school and beyond), which blends the topics of ODE and PDE simulation, derivative-based and and derivative-free optimization, and advanced state-space control and estimation.
We are working now to convert our popular Embedded Control & Robotics course into a globally-available hardware-focused Massively-Open Online Course (MOOC); early steps of that can be seen at the courses posted here; our ultimate goal is to bring the entirety of RR and NR fully into the digital age, with significant online components.