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Appendix G: Additional Resources

Curated list of learning materials, communities, and tools beyond this textbook.

Official Documentation​

ROS 2​

Gazebo​

Unity​

NVIDIA Isaac​

VLA / LLM​

Online Courses​

ROS 2​

  • The Construct: ROS 2 Basics in 5 Days (Python)

  • Udemy: ROS 2 for Beginners

    • Practical ROS 2 development
    • Mobile robot examples

Robotics Fundamentals​

  • Coursera: Modern Robotics (Northwestern University)

    • Kinematics, dynamics, control
    • Theoretical foundation

  • MIT OpenCourseWare: Introduction to Robotics

Deep Learning for Robotics​

Books​

Robotics Fundamentals​

  1. Siciliano, B., & Khatib, O. (Eds.). (2016). Springer Handbook of Robotics (2nd ed.).

    • Comprehensive reference
    • Covers all robotics subfields

  2. Murray, R. M., Li, Z., & Sastry, S. S. (1994). A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation.

ROS 2 Specific​

  1. Newbury, R., & Martinez, A. (2023). ROS 2 Robotics Developer's Handbook.

    • Practical ROS 2 development
    • Real-world examples

  2. Fairchild, C., & Harman, T. (2023). ROS 2 for Ubuntu 22.04.

    • Step-by-step tutorials
    • From basics to advanced

Deep Learning​

  1. Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., & Courville, A. (2016). Deep Learning.

  2. Zhang, A., et al. (2023). Dive into Deep Learning.

Research Papers (Key Papers)​

ROS 2​

  • Macenski, S., et al. (2022). Robot Operating System 2: Design, architecture, and uses in the wild. Science Robotics.

SLAM​

  • Mur-Artal, R., & Tardós, J. D. (2017). ORB-SLAM2. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
  • Campos, C., et al. (2021). ORB-SLAM3. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Vision-Language-Action​

  • Brohan, A., et al. (2022). RT-1: Robotics Transformer. arXiv:2212.06817.
  • Brohan, A., et al. (2023). RT-2: Vision-language-action models. arXiv:2307.15818.

Reinforcement Learning​

  • Schulman, J., et al. (2017). Proximal Policy Optimization. arXiv:1707.06347.
  • Makoviychuk, V., et al. (2021). Isaac Gym. arXiv:2108.10470.

Sim-to-Real Transfer​

  • Tobin, J., et al. (2017). Domain Randomization. IROS.
  • Peng, X. B., et al. (2018). Sim-to-Real Transfer with Dynamics Randomization. ICRA.

Community and Forums​

ROS Community​

Robotics Community​

NVIDIA Community​

Tools and Software​

Visualization​

  • RViz2: ROS 2 3D visualization

    • ros2 run rviz2 rviz2

  • PlotJuggler: Real-time plotting for ROS 2 topics

    • sudo apt install ros-humble-plotjuggler-ros

  • rqt_graph: Visualize ROS 2 computational graph

    • ros2 run rqt_graph rqt_graph

Simulation​

Development​

  • VS Code: Recommended IDE

    • Extensions: ROS, Python, C/C++, CMake Tools

  • Terminator: Terminal multiplexer

    • sudo apt install terminator

  • Docker: Containerization for reproducible environments

Datasets​

Robot Manipulation​

Computer Vision​

SLAM / 3D Vision​

Conferences (Where to Follow Research)​

Robotics​

AI / ML​

  • NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems)
  • ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning)
  • ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations)

Computer Vision​

  • CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)
  • ICCV (International Conference on Computer Vision)
  • ECCV (European Conference on Computer Vision)

YouTube Channels​

ROS 2 Tutorials​

  • The Construct: ROS 2 tutorials and courses
  • Articulated Robotics: Beginner-friendly ROS 2 content
  • Robotics Back-End: Practical ROS 2 projects

General Robotics​

  • MIT CSAIL: Research talks and demos
  • Boston Dynamics: Robot demos (Atlas, Spot)
  • NVIDIA Developer: Isaac Sim, Isaac ROS tutorials

Deep Learning​

  • Yannic Kilcher: Paper reviews and explanations
  • Two Minute Papers: Latest AI research summaries
  • Lex Fridman: Interviews with AI researchers

Code Repositories​

ROS 2 Packages​

Example Projects​

Perception​

Newsletters and Blogs​

Robotics News​

AI/ML News​

Technical Blogs​

Job Boards (For After Completion)​

Robotics Companies​

Startups​

  • AngelList: Filter by "Robotics"
  • Y Combinator Companies: Many robotics startups

General Tech​

  • LinkedIn Jobs: Search "ROS 2", "Robotics Engineer"
  • Indeed: Filter by robotics, automation

Professional Organizations​

IEEE​

Academic​

Open-Source Contributions​

Want to give back? Contribute to:

How to start:

  1. Find "good first issue" labels
  2. Read contributing guidelines
  3. Fix bugs, add features, improve documentation

Staying Current​

Robotics evolves rapidly. To stay updated:

  1. Follow key researchers on Twitter/X: (search for authors of papers you like)
  2. Subscribe to arXiv alerts: http://arxiv.org/ (cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.AI)
  3. Attend virtual conferences: Many have free registration
  4. Join Discord/Slack communities: Real-time discussions
  5. Build projects regularly: Best way to learn new techniques

Thank you for using this textbook! We hope these resources help you continue your journey in physical AI and robotics.

Feedback: If you have additional resources to suggest, please contribute to the textbook's GitHub repository.

🎓 Keep learning. Keep building. The future of robotics is in your hands! 🤖