Blog

Here is an archive of all the blog posts by category.

You may see some empty categories. They are displayed to give you a general idea of posts to come, and to hopefully help you think of what you want to see in the future.

You can also find all posts in order, from latest to earliest, on this page.

General Robotics

Robots are complex systems that require a breadth of technical domains. Sometimes it’s worth not digging too deep into any one technical topic, but rather discussing robots at the system level.

Task and Motion Planning

My personal favorite aspect of robotics engineering. How do you go from a high-level task specification to something modular, robust, and executable?

Motion Planning and Navigation

Humans and animals can unconsciously control the low-level motion of their bodies once they’re old enough to learn basic motor skills. Robots… not so much. How does a high-level behavior then get resolved to a motion plan or trajectory for its actuators?

Control Systems

Motion plans need to be executed on hardware. This is often a challenging controls problem, especially with systems that are inherently unstable, have nonlinear dynamics, and/or whose actuators are highly coupled.

  • Nothing yet 🙁

Computer Vision

Vision sensors, such as cameras and lidar, contain rich information about the environment. How can a robot extract this information to help it accomplish tasks?

Human-Robot Interaction and Language

How can humans and robots interact more naturally using speech, text, gestures, or other cues typically used in human-to-human communication?

Machine Learning

Instead of hand-coding rules on a robot, can a system automatically extract patterns and/or learn from data, demonstrations, and/or trial-and-error?

Software Development

Best practices and resources for programming and software development, with an obvious bias towards the robotics and artificial intelligence areas.

Career / Personal

Occasionally it’s nice to take a break from deeply technical topics and talk about more personal topics. This of this as the “other” category of the blog.

Contact me if you have post ideas, questions, or other feedback.