The year, week by week
The 54-week arc at a glance: one milestone per week, thirteen months, zero to a coordinated rover-and-VTOL fleet. The full field manual (parts lists, buy-by dates, the deep how-to) stays offline; this is the map.
Bench, electricity, and a first robot that drives itself.
Workshop, CAD & First Prints
Workshop operational: you can design parametric parts, print them, and read a first layer by eye.
Electricity for Real
Ohm's law by reflex, clean solder joints, and knowing why things go bang before they do.
Microcontrollers
Make a microcontroller do anything you can describe; reach for non-blocking timing by habit.
Your First Robot
A robot that drives itself: real hardware, real failures, and your first taste of proportional control.
Sensors, motors, power, and comms: the vocabulary of every robot after this.
Communication Protocols
I2C, SPI, and UART demystified: debug a dead bus by reading a logic-analyzer trace.
Sensor Fusion & Filtering
Turn noisy sensor data into a usable state estimate: reused for legs and flight alike.
Motors Deep Dive
Choose and drive the right motor for any task: the foundation for actuators and propulsion.
Power Systems & Energy Budgeting
Treat power as a budget you engineer: size a pack, read a discharge curve, predict runtime.
Raspberry Pi as the Brain
Run real software on real Linux controlling real hardware: the bridge into robot-world.
Learn the framework and the physics sandbox before touching the real thing.
ROS 2 Fundamentals
Nodes, topics, services, and the pub/sub model become second nature. You think in ROS graphs.
URDF, tf2 & Robot Description
Describe a robot's body to ROS and reason about coordinate frames without confusion.
Simulation in Gazebo
Simulate a robot in a physics world: infinite cheap iterations before hardware.
Nav2 and SLAM
A simulated robot builds a map and navigates it autonomously: the stack you'll run for real next.
Rover v1 and navigation: the first robot in the ground lineage.
Rover v1: Build & Bring-up
A self-built differential-drive base running ROS 2, Nav2, and SLAM in your home.
Sim-to-Real Bridge
Move code between sim and hardware deliberately, and know exactly where they diverge.
Map Your House: Full Autonomy
A robot that autonomously maps and patrols your whole home: your first genuinely useful system.
Voice and LLM Control
Speak to your robot in natural language and it does the right thing.
From what a camera actually gives you to the 2026 perception frontier.
Classical Computer Vision
Understand what a camera really gives you and process images with classical techniques.
Deep Perception: YOLO & the First Flywheel Turn
Train and deploy a real object detector, and build the dataset and eval discipline behind it.
Depth, 3D, and Stereo
Your robot perceives in 3D: essential for manipulation, avoidance, and flight.
Vision-Language Models for Robotics
Open-vocabulary perception and high-level scene understanding.
Requirements discipline, then build a legged robot that walks.
Systems Engineering, Requirements & FMEA
Decompose a system into testable requirements, define its interfaces, analyze failure on purpose.
Pupper: Sourcing, Actuators & Planning
Every part ordered, the build understood end to end, a deliberate actuator decision made.
Pupper: Frame & Legs
The mechanical robot exists: twelve actuators, legs, and body. It stands.
Pupper: Electronics, Power & Wiring
Fully wired, all twelve actuators talking on the CAN bus, a safe and clean power path.
Pupper: Calibration & First Walk
The Pupper walks: a machine you all built together trots across the floor.
A 1.25 m adjustable-height platform: the ground robot the fleet is built on.
Design, Requirements & Sourcing
A requirements-driven CAD design for the 1.25 m rover, every part sourced trusted and on order.
Frame, Drive & Power
A rolling chassis: four drive modules under closed-loop control and a working hardware E-stop.
Adjustable-Height Lift & Payload Deck
The signature feature works: a synchronized, safe deck with a modular payload interface.
Autonomy, Payload Integration & Missions
A fully autonomous platform navigating your property with an arm or sensor on the deck.
Make the legged robot see, think, and learn to walk on its own.
Kinematics: Transforms & Inverse Kinematics
Compute a foot's position from joint angles: and, harder, the angles that put it where you want.
Control Theory & Gait Tuning
Tune the controllers that keep a legged robot stable and moving well: PID in your hands.
Perception on the Pupper
Onboard perception driving locomotion: a mobile, seeing, walking robot.
RL Policies & Sim-to-Real for Legs
Train a walking policy in simulation and transfer it to the real Pupper.
Arms, imitation learning, and the loop that turns deployment into better models.
SO-100 Arm Build & Teleoperation
Two low-cost arms built, leader-follower teleoperable, ready to collect demonstration data.
Classical Manipulation with MoveIt
Motion planning, collision avoidance, grasping: knowing what learning replaces and what it doesn't.
Imitation Learning: ACT & Diffusion Policy
Teach the arm a task by demonstration and it generalizes: your first serious robot-learning model.
The Data Flywheel: MLOps for Robots
Build the machinery that turns deployment into data and data into better models.
Mobile Manipulation: Arm on Pupper
Manipulation meets mobility: the hardest and most capable robot of the month.
A trusted-stack multirotor, from bench to first autonomous mission.
Drone Build & Trusted Component Selection
A multirotor on a trusted flight stack, sized to a real thrust and power budget.
PX4 Configuration & Bench Testing
Configured, calibrated, and bench-tested: every subsystem verified before it leaves the ground.
FAA Part 107 Sprint & Export-Control Awareness
Ready to pass Part 107, and clear on the export-control regime that governs what you publish.
First Flights
The drone flies: manual, then assisted, then its first autonomous mission, safely.
A scaled long-endurance ISR aircraft: a platform, not a demo flyer.
ISR Aircraft Design + Airframe Selection
A scaled long-endurance VTOL designed to a real ISR mission and power budget.
Build the ISR VTOL & Integrate the Payload
Built, avionics configured for hybrid flight, mapping/thermal payload integrated and verified.
Wide-Area Autonomous Survey & Endurance
The full ISR profile flown: vertical takeoff, cruise, kilometers of survey, a georeferenced map.
Onboard intelligence, air-ground teamwork, and hardening the whole system.
Companion Computer & MAVLink
Onboard compute controls the flight controller programmatically: autonomy beyond waypoints.
Vision on the Drone
Onboard perception driving flight: detection, tracking, and visual following from the air.
Air-Ground Communication & Coordination
Drone and Pupper work as a team: the multi-robot capability every capstone builds on.
Robot Cybersecurity & Link Hardening
Understand your robots' attack surface and harden the links and interfaces that matter.
Cooperative SLAM & Pre-Capstone Polish
Shared maps, clean coordination, and a full FMEA on the engagement stack: ready for capstones.
Work where GPS is gone and the spectrum is denied.
RF & Spectrum Fundamentals with SDR
See the spectrum: understand what your own robots emit, and read a waterfall by eye.
RF Detection, Jamming & Counter-UAS Sensing
Detect and classify a drone by its RF signature; understand jamming and spoofing to defend.
GPS-Denied & Contested Navigation
Robots keep working when GPS is gone: visual-inertial odometry and graceful degradation.
Everything, integrated: the whole fleet on one mission.
Lost Hiker: Search & Rescue
A coordinated air-and-ground search: the VTOL sweeps wide, the rover investigates, they share a map.
Contested-Environment ISR
The full fleet operating under degraded links and denied GPS: the year's capabilities in one exercise.
The nitty-gritty: parts lists, buy-by dates, weekly hours, and the deep how-to: lives in the offline field manual.