Education and tutorials

This page will contain a list of education courses or tutorials for aerial robotics. This is a partly compilation of this ROS discourse thread and the May meeting about tutorials and education and some googling :)

This also includes input from a Linkedin post for a call of suggestions. This has been an adaption from the following Bitcraze Blogpost, and the overview presentation done for the ROS-aerial CWG meetings

Course explanation

This section explains some of the recourses in more detail.

Books

There is this important resource which is the book titled ‘Small Unmanned Aircraft: Theory and Practice.’ This book has been written by Randy Beard and Tim McLain of Brigham Young University, and it covers everything from the absolute basics of coordinate frames and quadrotor dynamics to path planning and cameras. It is a must-read for anybody starting in UAVs and Aerial robotics.

The physical book can be found here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9632.html

The available PDFs can be accessed on GitHub: https://github.com/randybeard/uavbook

Summer schools

There is an in-person IEEE RAS summer school on Multi-robot Systems organized by the Czech Technical University of Prague. It has been organized for over 5 summers and they use real aerial robotic platforms for their practicals with students, along with gettting lessons of both UAV and multi-robot experts. A summer school to not miss if you'd like to get started in the world of aerial robotics!

Link: https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/summer-school-2025/

The University of Soutern Denmark has their yearly Drone Summer School at the SDU UAS Center. Here you will learn to construct and fly drones focused around computer-vision. There will be team formation where the drone is build and where it can be flown outside in their huge UAS Denmark test center.

Link: https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/sduuascenter/education/drone-summer-school/

University Specialization in in Aerial Robotics

If you are fully committed to pursuing a career in aerial robotics, both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the University of North Dakota offer full bachelor’s majors in becoming a UAV engineer.

Link Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University: https://erau.edu/degrees/bachelor/unmanned-aircraft-systems Link University of North Dakota: https://und.edu/programs/unmanned-aircraft-system-operations-bs-aero/

If you have already done your bachelors in a different engineering major, or if you just want to learn, The University of Soutern Denmark offers a Drone and Autonomous Systems specialization for their master programmes in Robots Systems.

Link: https://www.sdu.dk/en/uddannelse/kandidat/robotteknologi/uddannelsens_opbygning/drone/

Online Courses on Aerial Robotics

This section shows online courses for aerial robotics with online instructor.

Coursera offers the ‘Robotics: Aerial Robotics’ course as part of the Robotics specialization. Taught by Prof. Vijay Kumar from Penn University, this 4-week course covers the mechanics and control of aerial vehicles using Matlab. It starts from 1 dimension and gradually progresses to the 3rd dimension in simulation. The course is part of a paid educational program, but you can audit the lessons for free.

Link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/robotics-flight

Udacity has been offering a course on Aerial Vehicles for quite some time for the Flying car nano degree. The lessons are taught by top names in the industry and cover key aspects of Aerial Robotics, such as motion planning, controls, and estimation, with lab assignments involving a real drone. The course duration is 4 months, and access is available for a fee.

Link: https://www.udacity.com/course/flying-car-nanodegree--nd787

EdX offers the 'ETHx: Autonomous Mobile Robots' course. Taught by Prof. Roland Siegwart, Dr. Davide Scaramuzza, Prof. Marco Hutter, Prof. Margarita Chli, Prof. Martin Rufli and Prof. Nicholas Lawrance from ETH Zurich, this 15-week course focuses on the principles of autonomous navigation and control of mobile robots. It covers topics such as perception, localization, planning, and control, which are essential for enabling robots to operate autonomously in dynamic environments. You can audit the course material for free with limited access.

Link: https://www.edx.org/learn/autonomous-robotics/eth-zurich-autonomous-mobile-robots?utm_campaign=social-sharing-course-page&utm_medium=social&utm_source=email

Additionally, there’s the course ‘Applied Control System 3: UAV Drone (3D Dynamics & Control)’ which is part of a series by Mark Misin. This course delves deep into the dynamics, control, and modeling of quadrotors.

Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/applied-control-systems-for-engineers-2-uav-drone-control/

University courses on Aerial Robotics with open resources

This section showes university courses that have released recordings of lectures, slides and/or assignments. For instructions participants would need to follow the actual course at that one university.

The University of Maryland offers a course on Autonomous Aerial Robotics, making all videos, slides, and assignments available. Taught by Nitin J. Sanket and Chahat Deep Singh, the course covers everything from basic control and dynamics to full autonomy. It’s a comprehensive resource for aerial robotics. The course utilizes the Parrot Bebop 2.0, and while a Mocap system is required, you may explore the possibility of adapting the course to a different platform. ROS is also part of this course

Link: http://prg.cs.umd.edu/enae788m

‘Visual Navigation For Autonomous Vehicles’ is a course available on MIT Open Courseware, taught by Prof. Luca Carlone. As the name implies, the course primarily focuses on autonomous navigation for any autonomous vehicle. It includes exercises where students implement vision algorithms on both ground robots and drones. Additionally, the course covers working with ROS and applying the knowledge to a simulated drone in Unity. The students also get to learn how to work with ROS

Link: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-485-visual-navigation-for-autonomous-vehicles-vnav-fall-2020/

The ‘Bio-inspired Robotics’ course at the University of Washington, led by Prof. Sawyer Fuller, explores the realm of drawing inspiration from nature rather than reinventing the wheel. It covers various robots inspired by creatures capable of swimming, walking, hopping, and of course, flying. Lab assignments in this course involve working with a Crazyflie drone.

Link: https://faculty.washington.edu/minster/bio_inspired_robotics/

Brown University offers a course called ‘Introduction to Robotics’ taught by Prof. Stefanie Tellix. While the introduction covers generic robotics, the focus of the full course is on building and programming the Duckiedrone. The course dives straight into autonomy and also teaches students how to work with ROS.

Link: https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs1951r/

Princeton University have also decided to release their ‘Intro to Robotics’ lectures and materials for the public. It covers all from control and estimation, computer vision and planning. Also it offers lab assignments with the Crazyflie.

Link: https://irom-lab.princeton.edu/intro-to-robotics/

Youtube

Youtube also has quite some tutorials available so this section highlights a few.

Drone Programming with Python: This popular tutorial/course teaches viewers how to program a real drone using Python with the DJI Tello. It offers a great opportunity for anyone looking for a short and enjoyable project to undertake, especially on a rainy day, while still working with a real platform.

Link: https://youtu.be/LmEcyQnfpDA

Intelligent Quads YouTube Channel: This channel is entirely dedicated to creating autonomous UAVs, covering topics from Ardupilot to MAVlink to ROS and Gazebo. It appears to be a valuable resource for beginners in the field of autonomous UAVs. This also includes ROS as part of the lessons as well.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/@IntelligentQuads

Quadcopter build and programming manual: This manual will guide you every step of the way, explaining the essentials on aeronautics, electronics and embedded programming. All components are commercially available and all programs are fully hackable, meaning that you can adapt anything you want and create a quadcopter capable of stuff that goes way beyond the scope of this manual!

Link: https://github.com/CarbonAeronautics/Manual-Quadcopter-Drone

Code Examples

Here are some code examples that can be used as reference for experiments.

Mambo ROS Examples: This is a collection of experiments targeted Parrot Mambo drones, there are experiments with one or multiple vehicles at the same time. It runs over ROS over BLE, and some test are adapted to make use of a Vicon MoCap system. From a control theory's perspective, it showcases an optional robust control strategy, using an H-Infinity controller with perturbation estimation and a identified dynamic model of a Parrot Mambo drone.

Link: https://github.com/TOTON95/Mambo_ROS_Examples

Some special mentions

So here there are some courses that either doesn't fit in the above categories or are deprecated.

Working list

This list contains some resources that we haven't included in the overview. Remove the item once it has been included

Credit

Lots of thanks for anybody contributing to this linkedin post. This was extremely helpful!

This page was last updated: November 26, 2024