Underactuated Robotics
Russ Tedrake's MIT graduate course tackles robots that cannot maintain full control authority at every instant, the way walking, swimming, and flying animals actually move. Lectures cover the nonlinear dynamics of passive systems like walking machines and swimmers, motion planning, partial feedback linearization, energy-shaping control, analytical optimal control, and reinforcement learning as a route to approximate optimal control. The course also examines how mechanical design itself shapes what a controller can achieve, drawing examples from legged locomotion, compliant manipulation, underwater robots, and flying machines. Materials include videotaped lectures recorded with help from John Roberts, along with the problem sets and readings that make up MIT's OpenCourseWare release. The emphasis throughout is on exploiting a machine's natural dynamics rather than fighting them, treating instability as a resource instead of a failure mode. It is an advanced course, assuming comfort with nonlinear dynamics and control theory, and it is offered free through MIT OCW with no certificate attached.