It quizzes you on the lesson
After each lesson it posts that day's questions in your channel, one at a time. You answer in your own words. It checks the answer, says what you got right, and gives you another go when you didn't.
Level 1 / entry / by application
Twenty minutes from now, you're driving a car you programmed.
Nothing to install — it runs in your browser. Eight weeks later that same instinct has turned into a car that explores a world it has never seen and delivers, on a stack you wrote line by line. Twenty-five minutes a day is all it asks of you, and you never do it alone: every lesson ends in a private Slack channel with me and a teaching assistant that can see the code you just ran.
Specification
Lessons57
Per lesson~25 min
Default pace8 weeks
FastestUp to you
PrereqCan write code
HardwareNone
EntryApplication
RefundThrough wk 1
HelpSlack tutor, every day
Your teaching assistant, in Slack
Every lesson ends in a private channel with me and a tutor I built.
The thing that stops people isn't the material. It's being stuck at eleven at night with nobody to ask. So each student gets a private Slack channel with me and an AI teaching assistant that knows the lesson you're on and can see the code you just ran. It's live, and this is what it does with you every day.
Then it hands you the exercise
When the quiz is done it posts the exercise: what it's called, how long to spend on it, the Target in one line, and your own link into the simulator.
It sees your work
Every run in the simulator saves your code and your numbers to it. Ask for help and it reads your latest code and your last run, so you don't paste anything.
It hints. It doesn't hand you the answer
Hints come off a ladder I wrote for each exercise, one rung at a time: a question back, then the idea, then the part of the lesson to reread, then a small piece of code. Nothing until you've run something yourself.
Submit, and you get a score
Submit run replays your car through the official run and scores it against the Target. On the leaderboard exercises, once you pass, a faster run ranks higher.
When the hints run out, I step in
If you climb the whole ladder and you're still stuck, it tells me, and you tag me in the channel with your code. I read the channels and jump in myself.
What it won't do. Write your controller for you. The whole point is that the stack is yours, line by line, and a tutor that gave you the answer would take that away. It also keeps an eye on what you've left open: if a quiz or an exercise is sitting unfinished, it nudges you.
Where you end up
Six things you'll be able to do in week eight that you can't do today.
- Put your car in a world it has never seen, and have it explore, build a map, work out where it is inside the map, and deliver to the places you name — on a stack you wrote line by line.
- Look at a robot that just drove into a wall, read the frames and the covariance on screen, and say which of six things caused it — instead of restarting and hoping.
- Write a PID controller from the equation up, and tune it by reasoning about the response rather than turning knobs until it stops wobbling.
- Write the Kalman filter that keeps a drifting position estimate honest, feed it lidar beams against a known map, and tune it until the doubt it reports matches its real error.
- Plan a route with A* on a grid whose walls you've grown by the car's size, and follow it with pure pursuit at a speed that stops where you mean to.
- Look at a diagram of a real robot's ROS nodes and topics and say what each one does — because you've already written every one of those jobs yourself.
That last one is the one that changes what happens to your job applications. You won't have memorized a framework; you'll have written the pieces frameworks are made of, and that's what lets you defend your work when someone asks.
Why you'll actually finish this one
Build it naive. Feel it break. Then learn why the tools exist.
Almost every robotics course starts with the framework and hopes you'll infer the problem it solves. That's backwards, and it's why people bounce off ROS.
Here you spend eight weeks writing an autonomous vehicle from nothing — your own PID, your own map, your own Kalman filter, your own planner — in a browser simulator with zero setup. You find out firsthand what's hard. Then, on the last day, you meet the name ROS gives each piece. The framework stops being arbitrary the moment every part of it is a problem you've already solved yourself.
Curriculum
Fifty-seven days, and what you can do at the end of each one.
Read this as a list of capabilities you pick up in order, not as a syllabus. Every week ends with something running that didn't run the week before.
8 weeks
Write an autonomous vehicle from scratch
Browser-based. Nothing to install.
Wk 01
Drive the car with code
One function, three numbers, sixty times a second. Turning radius, throttle, coordinate frames, heading, and your first state machine. You're driving within twenty minutes of opening the first lesson.
Wk 02
Steer toward goals, meet the lidar
P, then D, then I — each term added because the one before it fell short. Then sixteen lidar beams, grouped and compared.
Wk 03
Perceive, react, map
Obstacle avoidance, a priority order between behaviors, and lidar hits placed on a grid. Ends with the first leaderboard.
Wk 04
Where you think you are
Odometry, and why it drifts: a two-degree heading error becomes a large position error. Noise, the bell curve, and calibration.
Wk 05
Mapping done properly
Free space from every beam, log-odds, what drift does to walls, mapping a world you've never seen, and matching a scan to a map.
Wk 06
Localization with a Kalman filter
One dimension, then two, then heading. Lidar beams as measurements, tuning until the filter's doubt matches its real error, and where a Gaussian filter fails.
Wk 07
Planning
The grid as a graph, Dijkstra and A*, walls grown by the car's size, waypoints, replanning, and planning only through what the lidar has seen.
Wk 08
Follow, explore, deliver
Pure pursuit, speed limits that stop where you mean to, frontier exploration, and the final run: your car explores a world it has never seen and delivers. Two leaderboards.
Last day
Your stack in the real world
Every piece you wrote, next to the name it has in ROS on a real robot. No exercise, just the map from what you built to what you'll meet.
On localization, honestly. You write the estimator yourself — a Kalman filter, from one dimension up to lidar beams against a known map — and you watch where it breaks. What you don't write here is mapping and localizing at the same time: you map first, then localize against the finished map, which is how most deployed robots work anyway. Being the person who can look at a screen and say "your covariance is diverging because your wheel radius is wrong" gets you hired.
How it reaches you
One lesson a day, in your inbox. Faster if you want it faster.
Each morning you get the day's lesson. You read it, you answer the quiz in Slack, and you write code in the simulator.
Eight weeks is the default, not a rule
If you've got the time and it's clicking, ask for more and I'll send more. Some people run two or three lessons a day and finish in half the time. Nothing gets watered down — you just get through it sooner.
Then straight into Slack
Every lesson ends with one button into your private channel, where the teaching assistant already has the day's questions waiting. Ask it about the material at any hour; it knows which lesson you're on.
Weekly office hours, and how to get the most out of them. One group call a week, open to everyone. Submit your question at least 24 hours beforehand — that way I can dig into it properly and come back with a real answer instead of an off-the-cuff one, and everybody else gets the benefit of the question too.
To be straight with you about what this doesn't include: private time with me, or individual review of your code. That's what The Forge is for, and I'd rather tell you now than have you find out in week three.
Honest constraints
What this costs you that isn't money.
Per lesson~25 min
Per week5–7 hrs
Lessons57
Default pace8 weeks
This is built to fit around a full-time job, and it is still fifty-seven days of showing up. Nobody has ever absorbed this material by reading it — you write code every single day, and the days you skip are the days it stops compounding. If you can't find twenty-five minutes daily, wait until you can. I'd rather you start in March and finish than start today and stall in week five.
What it's worth to you
Where people take this next.
Foundations is a laptop-only program, so be clear-eyed about what it is: it makes you someone who can build robot software and prove it. Three honest destinations from there.
Into a robotics team at work
The most common route, and the least discussed. Plenty of people don't change employer — they become the one at their current company who can talk to the robotics or automation group, and get moved onto it.
Into applications that get answered
Robotics teams screen for evidence you've made a machine work. An autonomous stack you wrote line by line, and can explain line by line, is that evidence. It gets you the first call; the rest is on you.
Into hardware, properly
Some people finish and want to feel a real motor stall. That's The Forge — and you'll get four times as much out of it having done this first.
What I'm not telling you. That this gets you a job. It doesn't, on its own — nothing you can buy does. Robotics hiring also looks at years of experience, at where you are, and at whether a team has a seat open. What this removes is the specific reason you're being passed over right now, which is that there's nothing in your history showing you can make a robot work.
How you get in
Apply. I read every application.
Foundations isn't a checkout button. I'd rather know where you're starting from before you start, because putting someone in the wrong program at the wrong time is how people end up with a half-finished robot and a worse opinion of robotics. The form takes about six minutes.
- You apply. Tell me what you do now, what you've tried, and how many hours a week you can really give this.
- I read it myself and reply within two business days. If I don't think Foundations is right for you yet, I'll tell you what I'd do instead.
- Admitted students receive the payment link. One payment, nothing recurring.
- You get your Slack channel, and lesson one lands in your inbox on the next Monday morning.
One week, no argument. Do the first week: the lessons, the quizzes in Slack, the exercises in the simulator. By then you've seen the whole thing. If you don't think it's worth it, email me and I refund you in full. You don't have to explain and I won't try to talk you out of it. The only condition is that you did the work; I can't refund a program you didn't open.