Schedule
3/31/2025
Course Opening
syllabus, logistics, high-level framework of embodied AI
Section I: Robot Embodiment and Classical Robotics
4/2/2025
Control Architecture and Sensing
basic concepts of robotics and introduction to sensing
4/4/2025
Coordinates, Frames, and Perception
basic concepts to describe geometric transformations useful for robotics
4/7/2025
Motion Planning
basic concepts of robotics and introduction to sensing
4/9/2025
Motion Planning Details and Trajectory Optimization
motion planning for high DoF systems
4/11/2025
Acutation and Control
actuators and PID
Section II: Cognitive Basis of Embodied AI
4/14/2025
Human's Sensorimotor System I
introduction to neural mechanisms
4/16/2025
Human's Sensorimotor System II
introduction to neural mechanisms
Section III: Introduction to 2D and 3D Deep Learning
4/18/2025
Deep Dive into 2D CNNs for Robotics
convnets, efficient 2D networks
4/21/2025
Deep Dive into 3D Perception for Robotics
3D learning, pointnet, pointnet++, voxelnet, pointpillar
4/23/2025
6D Object Pose Estimation I
Classical approach for 6D pose estimation
4/25/2025
6D Object Pose Estimation II
Learning-based approaches for 6D pose estimation
Section IV: Reinforcement Learning
4/28/2025
Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning I
basic concepts of RL, MDP
4/30/2025
Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning II
value estimation
5/2/2025
Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning III
Q-learning
5/5/2025
On-Policy RL I
Policy Gradient Theorem, REINFORCE
5/7/2025
On-Policy RL II
TRPO, PPO
5/9/2025
Off-Policy RL I
Introduction to off-policy RL
5/12/2025
Off-Policy RL II
DDPG, TD3
5/14/2025
Model-based RL I
Introduction to model-based RL
5/16/2025
Model-based RL II
PlaNet, TD-MPC
Section V: Decision Sequence Modeling
5/19/2025
Autoregressive Decision Sequence Modeling
Introduction to autoregressive models
5/21/2025
Diffusion-Based Decision Sequence Modeling
diffusion models
5/23/2025
Skill Chaining and Trajectory Translation
skill chaining, instruction-based polices
Section VI: Robot Data Strategies