Boston Robot Hackers

New to robotics? These resources will give you a solid foundation.

• MIT OpenCourseWare: Introduction to Robotics — Classic MIT course covering kinematics, dynamics, and control
• Robotics Academy (Carnegie Mellon) — Hands-on curriculum for beginners using real robots
• ROS 2 Tutorials — Official step-by-step introduction to the Robot Operating System
• Articulated Robotics YouTube Channel — Practical ROS 2 and robot building from scratch
• The Robotics Back-End Blog — Focused tutorials on ROS, Python, and embedded systems

Core software skills every roboticist needs.

• Python Robotics (GitHub) — Sample implementations of robotics algorithms in Python
• ROS 2 Documentation — Full reference for nodes, topics, services, actions, and more
• Gazebo Simulation — Industry-standard robot simulation environment
• MoveIt 2 — Motion planning framework for manipulation
• Nav2 (Navigation Stack) — Complete autonomous navigation for mobile robots

Build and wire the physical side of your robot.

• SparkFun Electronics Tutorials — Guides on sensors, motors, microcontrollers, and more
• Adafruit Learning System — Hands-on electronics tutorials for makers
• FIRST Robotics technical guides — WPILib docs covering motor controllers, sensors, and CAN bus
• Hackaday.io Projects — Community-shared hardware builds and schematics
• Open Source Robotics Hardware (OSRF) — Open-hardware robot platforms and reference designs

Teach your robot to see and understand its environment.

• OpenCV Python Tutorials — Comprehensive guide to image processing and computer vision
• YOLO Object Detection — Fast real-time object detection with Ultralytics YOLO
• Depth Camera Guide (Intel RealSense) — Point clouds and depth sensing with ROS 2
• Point Cloud Library (PCL) — 3D perception and processing tutorials
• Kalman Filters Explained — Visual intuition for state estimation

Move your robot from point A to point B safely and efficiently.

• Probabilistic Robotics (Thrun, Burgard, Fox) — The definitive textbook on robot state estimation and SLAM
• Planning Algorithms (LaValle) — Free textbook covering sampling-based and search-based planning
• Nav2 Concepts — Behavior trees, costmaps, and planner plugins explained
• A* and Dijkstra Visualizer — Interactive introduction to path planning algorithms
• OMPL: Open Motion Planning Library — Sampling-based planners used in MoveIt and many research systems

Apply modern machine learning to robot perception and control.

• Deep Learning Specialization (Coursera) — Andrew Ng's foundational deep learning course sequence
• Spinning Up in Deep RL (OpenAI) — Practical introduction to deep reinforcement learning
• Hugging Face LeRobot — Open-source real-world robot learning models and datasets
• Stanford CS231n: CNNs for Visual Recognition — Computer vision with deep learning
• Google Robotics Research — Papers and projects from Google's robotics lab

Landmark papers every serious roboticist should know.

• A Formal Basis for the Heuristic Determination of Minimum Cost Paths (Hart, Nilsson, Raphael 1968) — The original A* paper
• ORB-SLAM2 (Mur-Artal & Tardós, 2017) — Real-time monocular, stereo, and RGB-D SLAM
• RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models (Google DeepMind, 2023) — Robotics transformer using web-scale vision-language pretraining
• Fast and Furious: Real Time End-to-End 3D Detection (Luo et al., 2018) — Efficient 3D object detection for autonomous vehicles
• Rapidly-exploring Random Trees: A New Tool for Path Planning (LaValle, 1998) — Foundational RRT paper

Stay connected and keep learning with the broader robotics world.

• BRH Mailing List — Ask questions, share ideas, and get help from fellow members
• ROS Discourse Forum — The main community forum for ROS users and developers
• Robotics Stack Exchange — Q&A for robotics professionals and enthusiasts
• IEEE Robotics & Automation Society — Professional society with conferences, journals, and local chapters
• ICRA 2025 — IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation