This is the first post in what is hopefully a long and detailed series. I’ve learned a thing or two over the years and I want to use that experience to make something I haven’t seen before: A field guide for practical commercial robotics.

I’ve seen many tutorials on “my first turtlebot”, or half broken tutorials on simulation using gazeebo, or countless medium articles on how do some small specific thing like train a PyTorch net. These types of resources have been invaluable to me in building my professional skills, but they are geared towards people just getting started. Not masochists like me (and presumably you, my dear reader) who did those tutorials already and decided they enjoyed swearing at their computer for a living.

The goal of this series is to build a robot that can map an area and go from point a to point b. Similar goals or pieces of it make up the previously mentioned entry level resources, but I want to cover all of the steps to a commercial production level. Everything from Chassis design to PCB design to CI/CD to Simulation to Motion Planning to Machine Learning. I want to show you not only how to implement the individual components, but I want to show you how professional robotics companies approach developing complex robotics to actually deliver a product.

We won’t be starting out at “learn to write C++”, this series assumes you have the following set of skills:

• You are a competent software engineer already for
  • C++
  • Python
• You are a compentent in Calculus at a level expected of for an undergraduate degree
  • Same as above but for linear algebra
  • Same as above but for physics

If you don’t meet the above criteria but the field of robotics still interests you, feel free to follow along, you will still likely pick up a thing or two. And learning how these things are applied in a real-world context can make them easier to learn later, but this will be written from the perspective of you having the above set of skills.

Shhhh my sweet prince, lay back down and let me tell you a story. I’ve been in this industry for 10 years, developing on road and off road autonomous vehicles. I’ve designed PCBs for sensor heads, designed scaled simulation frameworks that used all of the AWS instances on the east coast for a weekend, written motion planners, SLAM frameworks, led huge teams of people through highly technical projects, started my own multi-million $ robotics company. I certainly don’t know everything, but what I have picked up I want to share in the hopes that others can benefit from it and do greater things than I ever did. Now until next time, go back to sleep…