01 — Course

Robotics

Learn it in simulation: Python, ROS and a 3D world that boots in a browser tab.

This is the course Collegica was started for. In 2020 it became clear that the whole of robotics — frames and transforms, ROS, perception, navigation — could be taught without a lab, because the simulators had got good enough to run in a browser and Python was already the language of the field.

What you need

A browser. That is the whole list. No ROS install, no Ubuntu partition, no hardware. Enough Python to write a loop and a class; no robotics and no linear algebra beyond school level — the maths arrives when it is needed and not before.

On Collegica

  • Words In, Joints Out — vision-language-action models, from RT-2 to π0.7: the one shape nearly all of them share, which ones you can download and under what licence, and what they ask of you before they will move your robot
  • Train the Robot Before You Build It — NVIDIA’s robotics stack read from the outside: Warp and Newton, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, Cosmos and GR00T, Jetson — what each piece is, what it runs on, what it costs to try, and the one part that ran on a machine with no GPU at all

Status

The syllabus is being written, and the course will appear here module by module. Announcements go out through the newsletter.