Robotics Software Engineer

In this first lesson, you'll meet your instructors, learn about the structure of this program and about the services available to you as a student.

Ask three people what a robot is and you'll get three different answers! Here we ask your instructors, three expert roboticists from Electric Movement.

In this lesson, you'll learn the skills you need to tackle the first project, where you'll experience the three essential elements of robotics -- perception, decision making, and actuation.

Project Description - Search and Sample Return

Project Rubric - Search and Sample Return

As you learn the skills you’ll need in order to work in the robotics industry, you’ll see Career Lessons and Projects that will help you improve your online professional profiles.

Obtain an architectural overview of the Robot Operating System Framework and setup your own ROS environment on your computer.

Learn about ROS workspace structure, essential command line utilities, and how to manage software packages within a project. Harnessing these will be key to building shippable software using ROS.

ROS Nodes are a key abstraction that allows a robot system to be built modularly. In this lesson, you'll learn how to write them using Python.

Build a GitHub Profile on par with senior software engineers.

This week you'll learn about biologically inspired robots, and why studying these robotics may unlock the the potential of future robotic systems.

Robotics is an interdisciplinary field, which means there are different jobs opportunities depending on your background and interests. Discover options to a Robotics career.

In this lesson you'll get an introduction to the exciting field of kinematics and learn about the most important types of serial manipulators used in the robotics industry.

Here you'll dive deep into the details of solving the forward and inverse kinematics problem for serial manipulators.

In this lesson you will learn how to control a robotic arm with six degrees of freedom to perform pick and place actions using Inverse Kinematics.

Project Description - Robotic Arm: Pick & Place

Project Rubric - Robotic Arm: Pick & Place

Learn about some of the technical and ethical challenges when robots co-exist with humans.

After you've built your prototype, it's time to talk about it. Learn how to best describe a robot prototype and communicate your goals and knowledge.

Here's a quick look at what to expect in the upcoming lessons and project.

Dive into the world of perception in three dimensions! After a brief tour of 3D sensors used in robotics we'll explore the capabilities of RGB-D cameras, which you'll use in these lessons.

To understand your sensor data you first need to calibrate! Here you'll get a handle on RGB-D camera calibration and how to do filtering and basic segmentation on your point cloud data.

Clustering is a powerful machine learning method for segmenting objects of any arbitrary shape in your point cloud data. Here you'll compare K-means and Euclidean clustering for object segmentation.

In this lesson, you'll take your segmented point cloud and isolate features you can use to train a machine learning algorithm to recognize the object you're looking for!

In the project at the end of this lesson, you'll bring together everything you know about perception in three dimensions, from filtering and segmentation to feature extraction and object recognition!

Project Description - 3D Perception

Project Rubric - 3D Perception

Learn about the cutting-edge field of soft robotics.

Learn about cutting-edge research and development in robot grasping

In this lesson you'll learn about Controls and how to create and tune PID controllers.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to control a Quadrotor inside a Unity environment using a PID based Positional Controller within a ROS node.

Learn about swarm robotics and how these robots can be used in areas such as medicine and search and rescue.

In this lesson, Luis Serrano provides you with a solid foundation for understanding how you build powerful neural networks from the ground up.

Vincent Vanhoucke, Principal Scientist at Google Brain, introduces you to deep learning and TensorFlow, Google's deep learning framework.

Vincent walks you through how to go from a simple neural network to a deep neural network. You'll learn about why additional layers can help and how to prevent overfitting.

Vincent explains the theory behind Convolutional Neural Networks and shows you how to dramatically improve performance in image classification.

In this lesson, you'll learn the motivation for Fully Convolutional Networks and how they are structured.

In this lesson you'll be introduced to the problem of Scene Understanding and the role FCNs play.

In this project, you'll build and train an FCN to find a specific person in images from a simulated quad-copter.

Project Description - Follow Me

Project Rubric - Follow Me

Wrapping up your first term!

In this lesson, you will learn the C++ you need to prepare you for your second term in the Robotics Nanodegree program.

Meet the Term 2 instructors and learn about the Term 2 outline.

Learn how to identify the key components of the Jetson TX2 and how to set it up.

Learn about some basic hardware common to robotics including some specific information for use with the Jetson TX2.

Hands-on lab to control an LED from the Jetson TX2 command line, including how to calculate correct resistor values.

General information about the many types of sensors that are used in robotics systems including cameras, IMU, encoders, and more.

Learn how to use the Nvidia DIGITS tool to manage data and model training.

Learn to evaluate real-time considerations when using an inference engine in robotics applications.

Design your own robotic system using inference, collect your own data set for classification, and justify network design choices based on your analysis

Project Description - Robotic Inference

Project Rubric - Robotic Inference

Introduction to the localization concept and the algorithms

Learn the Kalman Filter and Extended Kalman Filter Gaussian estimation algorithms.

Learn how to apply an EKF ROS package to a robot to estimate its pose.

Learn the Monte Carlo Localization algorithm which uses particle filters to estimate a robot's pose.

Learn how to code the Monte Carlo Localization algorithm in C++.

You will build your own mobile robot and use the Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization algorithm in ROS to estimate the robot’s pose.

Project Description - Where Am I?

Project Rubric - Where Am I?

Introduction to the Mapping and SLAM concepts, as well as the algorithms.

Learn how to map an environment with the Occupancy Grid Mapping algorithm.

Learn how to simultaneously map an environment and localize a robot relative to the map with the Grid-based FastSLAM algorithm.

Learn how to simultaneously map an environment and localize a robot relative to the map with the GraphSLAM algorithm.

Deploy RTAB-Map on your simulated robot to create 2D and 3D maps of a predefined environment. Then create your own environment to map!

Project Description - Map My World Robot

Project Rubric - Map My World Robot

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning for Robotics

Learn the fundamentals of classic Reinforcement Learning

Learn the Q-Learning algorithm and use it to solve problems in OpenAI Gym

Learn how to combine neural networks with RL in the Deep Q-Network (DQN) algorithm

Learn to solve OpenAI Gym problems with the DQN algorithm

Learn to apply DQN to a robotic problem

Build a robotic arm that learns with Deep RL.

Project Description - Deep RL Arm Manipulation

Project Rubric - Deep RL Arm Manipulation

Learn what the lessons in Path Planning and Navigation will cover.

Learn a number of classic path planning approaches that can be applied to low-dimensional robotic systems.

Learn to code the BFS and A* algorithms in C++.

Learn about sample-based and probabilistic path planning and how they can improve on the classic approach.

Learn about recent research that applies deep learning to robotic navigation problems.

Program a home service robot that will autonomously map an environment and navigate to pickup and deliver objects.

Project Description - Home Service Robot

Project Rubric - Home Service Robot

Find your next job or connect with industry peers on LinkedIn. Ensure your profile attracts relevant leads that will grow your professional network.

Project Description - Improve Your LinkedIn Profile

Project Rubric - Improve Your LinkedIn Profile

Other professionals are collaborating on GitHub and growing their network. Submit your profile to ensure your profile is on par with leaders in your field.

Project Description - Optimize Your GitHub Profile

Project Rubric - Optimize Your GitHub Profile

Congratulations! You've reached the end of the Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program! Read on to learn how to officially complete the program and graduate.

Plan a path through a maze for an industrial Kuka Manipulator Arm, then watch your code run on real hardware!

Obtain an architectural overview of the Robot Operating System Framework and setup your own ROS environment on your computer.

Learn about ROS workspace structure, essential command line utilities, and how to manage software packages within a project. Harnessing these will be key to building shippable software using ROS.

ROS Nodes are a key abstraction that allows a robot system to be built modularly. In this lesson, you'll learn how to write them using Python.

Helpful instruction to help you get started with the project