The online robotics community is huge and there is a ton of resources on every robotics topic you can imagine. This huge amount of content can be confusing especially when you are just starting to learn robotics and are not yet sure what to search for. This article helps you to find the right places with good, useful content. I divided the resources into four categories: Courses, Blogs, Lectures and Podcasts. For each category I have a list with a description of the resource. This should give you some good hints where to start such that you don’t get lost in the huge world of online robotics content.

Note: If you want to learn robotics and you are not sure where to start, make sure to check out my post on how to start learning robotics.

Online Robotics Courses

There are many platforms that offer courses on various different topics. Some of them even for free. Same goes for robotics so here is a list of robotics courses that you can take online:

• The Construct: This is a learning platform especially for ROS. They have different courses on topics like Robot Navigation, Machine Learning for Robotics or Robot Manipulation. You can have limited access for free but you only get their full service if you pay a monthly subscription fee. This service includes not only access to all their courses but also provides you with an online development environment in which you can work on your robotics projects.
• Udemy: There are a lot of courses especially for learning ROS like ROS2 For Beginners. The price for one course is usually around 100$.

So far the presented courses take a more practical approach. The following ones are rather focused on the theoretical concepts:

• Coursera: The learning platform has two robotics courses. One of them is called Modern Robotics and is offered by Northwestern University. It’s focus is on robot kinematics and dynamics as well as planning and control. The other one, Robotics by University of Pennsylvania teaches about motion planning and perception especially for flying robots. In both courses you can enroll for free.
• edx: Two courses on this platform are especially interesting. Robotics Foundations I – Robot Modeling as well as Robotics Foundation II – Robot Control are taught by the great Bruno Siciliano (one of the authors of the Handbook of Robotics). While the first one covers kinematics and dynamics, the second one focuses on robot control.
• QUT robot academy: This awesome project from the Queensland University of Technology provides a lot of short learning videos. You will find videos on nearly every topic from sensors over 3D vision and dynamics/control to robotics in the context of society and ethics.

Taking full courses like the above ones is a good start if you want to be guided on your robotics learning path. That way you don’t need to gather your information from different resources but instead everything is readily prepared for you.

Robotics blogs

Blogs are great for getting answers on specific topics or questions and all of this is for free! The content is usually less detailed as in, say, university lectures but often presented in an easier, more comprehensible way. Here is a list of helpful robotics blogs:

• The Robotics Back-End: This blog provides very useful tutorials on ROS programming. Especially for ROS2 there is quite some interesting content already.
• Automatic Addison: There are a lot of posts on this robotics focused blog. Addison Sears-Collins writes very helpful tutorials on a variety of specific topics related to Computer Vision, Planning, ROS Basics and much more. The tutorials are very practically oriented and mostly written for programming in Python.
• The Construct: I already mentioned The Construct in the list of courses above but they also have quite some free content on their blog. Most of the time they tackle specific, ROS related questions.
• Robotiq Blog: Robotiq is a company that is focused on different kinds of robotic grippers. They also run a blog to keep in touch with their customers. The content is not focused on tutorials but rather on more general robotics topics and the industry. You will find articles about Telepresence, the cost of robot screwdriving or the best applications for a robot force sensor. While it’s not so much focused on robot development, it still gives some interesting insights in the industry.

On Robotics Casual I try to provide useful content for everyone who is interested in learning more about robotics. So if you want to learn robotics in a more practical manner, make sure to check out my Robotics tutorials and other articles on this blog.

Robotics podcasts

Personally, I love podcasts. I like listening to insightful conversations while I am commuting, cleaning the house or cooking. That way I don’t need to make any additional time investment. Here is a list of the podcasts I find most interesting:

• The Lex Fridman podcast: If you are interested in podcasts and especially in tech you might have very well heard of this one. Lex is a Machine Learning researcher at MIT and most of the content is of some technical nature although he more and more tests the waters in non-technical topics. The podcast is vastly popular due to the long, detailed conversations with a lot of awesome guests. Lucky for us, Lex is also interested in Robotics as this is one of his research focuses, so he also interviewed some great Roboticists on the podcast. Two of my favorites are the one with Russ Tedrake and the one with Sergey Levine. Despite the topics, this podcast is always great to listen to due to the special interview stile and deep conversations.
• The Robot Brains Podcast: I already mentioned Pieter Abbeel, who teaches at the University of California, in the list of lectures. He also has a great podcast where he interviews a lot of interesting people. He mainly focuses on Artificial Intelligence topics, often in the context of robotics as this is his research focus.
• Robohub podcast: The team behind this podcast are a group of volunteers who are interviewing experts in robotics. The interviewees do a very good job at having sound technical discussions without getting lost in the details. If you want to know more about different fields of robotics that you don’t have many insights in yet, this is podcast is a good opportunity.
• Sense Think Act Podcast: This one is hosted by Audrow Nash and sponsored by Open Robotics, the company behind ROS. It is probably the most technical podcast in this list and at times dives very deep into the topics. If you are already working with ROS or plan to do so then this podcast is a great resource because some of the episodes are targeting specific ROS packages (for example Moveit).
• The Robot Report Podcast: This podcast is mostly non-technical and covers more business and industry related topics. However, they interview interesting experts and also cover exciting new companies and recent financing rounds. Listening to this podcast from time to time is a good way to stay up to date on what is happening in the industry.

Online Robotics Lectures

One of the side effects of the pandemic is that more and more university courses were held online. That’s lucky for us because more and more of these courses where recorded and are now available for free. Keep in mind that university lectures are by nature very focused on the theoretical concepts, rather than their practical implementation. For following these lectures you should have a solid mathematical background. In the following I will list examples of robotics lectures that are worth checking out:

• ENB339 Introduction to Robotics: This course from the Queensland University of Technology talks about fundamentals of robotics like transformation matrices, forward and inverse kinematics as well as velocity, force and the jacobian matrix.
• ENB339 Introduction to robot vision: Another course from QUT which teaches the basics of Computer Vision. It covers topics like image processing, the nature of colors, how to extract image features and how to deal with image geometry
• MIT 6.832 Underactuated robots: This course by the great Russ Tedrake is talking about robot dynamics. Robot dynamics deals with how forces are producing accelerations in the robot. This might sound a bit unexciting but it is one of the fundamentals besides robot kinematics to understand how the robot moves.
• Robotics 2 at Sapienza University of Rome: In this course the famous Alessandro de Luca talks about robot control. He covers many topics, starting from position control over cartesian control and impedance control to collision detection.
• Advances Robotics at UC Berkley: In this course, Pieter Abbeel teaches a wide variety of slightly more advances topics in robotics. Among other things he talks about linear optimal control, optimization, motion planning, kalman filters and even reinforcement learning. You are not familiar with these terms? Then it’s time to check out the lecture!
• Programming for Robotics (ROS) from ETH Zürich: This course from ETH gives an Introduction to ROS programming. It teaches how to interface to sensors and actuators, implement control algorithms and use a robot in simulation

Lectures are good if you are really interested in a topic and want to learn the fundamental concepts. They are probably most useful for people who already have or are currently studying at a college or university. In addition it might be interesting for people who want to know if a degree related to robotics is for them.

Conclusion

There is so much great content online for learning robotics if you know where to search for it. Different kinds of resources are useful for different kind of content and it is good to make use of all of them. I hope you find the lists helpful and you will discover many more great resources when go from there. Also, if you are interested in starting your own robotics projects check out the best projects to learn robotics. Thanks for reading and if you have feedback or additional resources that are worth checking out, leave your comment in the comments section.