Robotics

Machines that sense, decide and move: the motors, sensors and math inside a robot, how it controls its motion, finds its way and runs on ROS 2, how industrial robots are programmed and kept safe, and where AI is taking them — with three simulations you can play with right in the page.

18 pages 119 glossary terms

How to use this topic

The pages go from the ground up. The first four are about the machine itself: what a robot is, its parts, the motors that move it and the sensors that tell it what is happening. Pages 5 to 11 are the theory every robot runs on: coordinate frames, kinematics, motion control, odometry, localization, path planning and vision. Pages 12 and 13 cover the software around it, ROS 2 and simulation. The last five are about robots in the real world: industrial practice, safety and the law, AI, robots at work, and planning a small robot of your own.

Most theory pages have short Python programs that use only the standard library, so you can run them anywhere Python runs: a two-link arm, a PID loop on a motor, wheel odometry, a Kalman filter, A* on a grid. Each comes with its exact output. Formulas are shown next to the code that computes them. ROS 2, simulators and vendor robot languages are not installed on the test machine, so those blocks are marked illustrative.

Three simulations

Three pages have a simulation you can play with: a two-link robot arm with forward and inverse kinematics on Kinematics, a line-following robot with PID gains to tune on Motion Control and PID, and an A* planner you can run step by step on Path Planning. Nothing runs until you press Play. Below each simulation are its HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which you can read or paste into a CodePen Pen.

The simulations draw with WebGL through the Three.js library. Almost every current desktop and phone browser supports it; where it is missing, the frame shows a message instead of the drawing. They work with a mouse, touch or the keyboard, and each page explains the controls and what to try.

This topic builds on IoT & Embedded Systems for microcontrollers, sensors and actuators, pins and power, and on OT & Industrial Control Systems for PID control, PLCs and functional safety. The math comes from Math for IT, especially vectors and matrices, trigonometry and shortest paths. Artificial Intelligence explains computer vision and how machines learn, which robots use more and more. The code examples are plain Python; general ideas such as algorithms, data structures and concurrency are in Programming Concepts.

Learning path

  1. 01What Is Robotics?What a robot is and where the word comes from: Čapek's play, Asimov's fiction and the first industrial robot, the main kinds of robots today, and how many there are according to the International Federation of Robotics.Beginner
  2. 02Anatomy of a RobotThe parts every robot arm shares: links and joints, degrees of freedom, workspace, end effector and payload, and why a robot is far more repeatable than it is accurate.Beginner
  3. 03Motors and DrivesHow robots move: brushed DC motors, hobby servos, stepper and brushless motors, gearboxes and strain wave gears, and the H-bridges and motor drivers that sit between a microcontroller and a motor.Beginner
  4. 04Sensors for RobotsHow a robot senses itself and the world: rotary encoders, IMUs and sensor fusion, lidar, ultrasonic sensors, depth cameras and force sensors, with the numbers that matter when you choose one.Beginner
  5. 05Coordinate Frames and TransformsHow robots keep track of where things are: coordinate frames and poses, rotation matrices and homogeneous transforms, Euler angles and gimbal lock, quaternions, and the frame conventions ROS uses.Intermediate
  6. 06KinematicsFrom joint angles to hand position and back: forward and inverse kinematics of a two-link arm, elbow up and elbow down, Denavit–Hartenberg parameters, the Jacobian and singularities — with an arm you can move yourself.Intermediate
  7. 07Motion Control and PIDHow a robot follows a planned motion: PID loops on motors, cascade control, trapezoidal velocity profiles, feedforward, integral windup and following error — with a line-following robot whose gains you can tune.Intermediate
  8. 08Mobile Robots and OdometryHow wheeled robots move and estimate where they are: differential drive and holonomic robots, wheel odometry from encoder ticks, and why dead reckoning always drifts.Intermediate
  9. 09Localization and MappingHow a robot works out where it is on a map, and builds the map while it drives: the Kalman filter, particle filters, occupancy grids, SLAM and loop closure.Advanced
  10. 10Path PlanningHow a robot finds a way from A to B: grids and configuration space, breadth-first search, Dijkstra and A* with heuristics, random trees and obstacle avoidance — with a planner you can watch step by step.Intermediate
  11. 11Robot VisionHow robots use cameras: the pinhole camera model, intrinsics and calibration, fiducial markers such as AprilTag and ArUco, stereo depth, and detecting objects to pick.Intermediate
  12. 12ROS 2The Robot Operating System, version 2: nodes, topics, services and actions, parameters and launch files, tf2, DDS and quality of service, the distributions and their support dates, and MoveIt, Nav2 and micro-ROS.Intermediate
  13. 13Simulation and Digital TwinsTesting robots before they exist: simulators such as Gazebo, Webots, Isaac Sim and MuJoCo, robot descriptions in URDF, physics engines, the gap between simulation and reality, and digital twins of robot cells.Intermediate
  14. 14Industrial Robots and Cobots in PracticeHow industrial robots are programmed and run: teach pendants, the tool center point, vendor languages such as RAPID, KRL and URScript, offline programming, the robot cell, and the PLC around it.Intermediate
  15. 15Robot Safety and StandardsHow people are kept safe around robots: risk assessment, the 2025 editions of ISO 10218, collaborative applications with power and force limiting or speed and separation monitoring, stops, and the machinery law in the EU, the US and the UK.Intermediate
  16. 16AI in RoboticsHow AI is changing robots: reinforcement learning in simulation, imitation learning from demonstrations, vision-language-action models, and where humanoid robots really stand as of October 2026.Intermediate
  17. 17Robots at WorkWhere robots work today: warehouses, inspection of the power grid, farms and operating rooms, how robot density differs per country, and what robots mean for jobs and skills.Beginner
  18. 18Building Your First RobotPlanning a small two-wheeled robot car: choosing a board and a motor driver, PWM and logic levels, separate power for motors and logic, an emergency stop, and handling LiPo batteries safely.Beginner

Robotics glossary

Short definitions of the terms used in this topic. The full glossary covers every topic.