Modern Robotics: the standard course, free to audit

If robotics has a standard text, this is it. Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning and Control, from Kevin Lynch at Northwestern University, is the course that other robotics courses assume you have done.

You can audit it free on Coursera, and the full lecture series is on YouTube without any enrolment at all. The certificate is the only paid part.

What it covers

Configuration space, rigid-body motions, forward and inverse kinematics, velocity kinematics and statics, dynamics of open chains, trajectory generation, motion planning, robot control, grasping and manipulation. It is mathematically serious — expect linear algebra — and it repays the effort.

Where to go next

• Stanford Intro to Robotics (CS223A) — kinematics, dynamics and control from another angle
• MIT OCW — Underactuated Robotics — advanced, fully free, for when the standard control assumptions stop holding
• Begin Robotics (University of Reading, on FutureLearn) — the accessible on-ramp if the above is too steep, and it needs no hardware

More on all of these in our free robotics learning guide.