Free online courseRobotics and control

Course Description

Robots are no longer confined to factory floors. From precision manufacturing to rehabilitation devices and medical interventions, modern robotic systems depend on engineers who can translate motion goals into reliable, safe behavior. This free online course in Robotics and Control helps you build that engineering mindset by connecting core theory with practical modeling decisions used in real robot mechanisms.

You will learn to describe robot motion in a rigorous way using coordinate frames, homogeneous transformations, and rotation matrices—tools that make complex multi-joint systems manageable and programmable. As you progress, you will move from describing pose to understanding how small changes propagate through a mechanism, setting the stage for differential motion, Jacobians, and the relationship between joint space and end-effector behavior.

With the kinematic foundation in place, the course takes you into direct and inverse kinematics so you can compute what a robot is doing and what it must do to reach a desired position. That naturally leads to trajectory planning, where you focus on generating motions that are not just reachable, but smooth and feasible for actuators and sensors. You then go deeper into dynamics, using energy-based formulations and multi–degree-of-freedom modeling to connect masses, forces, and torques to motion.

Control is where these pieces become a working system. You will explore stability concepts and the structure of classical manipulator models, then extend to advanced strategies that appear in research and industry applications, including sliding mode and higher order approaches. The course also broadens your perspective beyond standard arms, touching on biped stability concepts, learning-based methods with neural networks, and redundancy resolution inspired by human fingers and cooperative manipulation.

To connect robotics with emerging applications, you will see how these ideas extend to exoskeletons, intent-driven assistance, and robot-assisted percutaneous interventions where precision and safety matter. By the end, you will have a cohesive understanding of how robotic mechanisms are modeled, analyzed, and controlled—valuable preparation for engineering roles, projects, or further study in mechanical and industrial robotics.