ARM: Autonomous Robotics Immersions
Welcome to ARM (Autonomous Robotics immersions) — a six-week summer program teaching high school students Python programming, robotics, and machine learning. Students build their own robot arms from scratch and program them to autonomously play tic-tac-toe, learning everything from basic Python to computer vision and kinematics along the way.
ARM is developed and maintained by the RIPL lab at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). Course contributors include Randall Landsberg, Dr. Michael Rodgers, Matthew Walter, and Kevin Wu.
What You'll Learn
- Python programming — from basic syntax and control structures to data structures, modules, and debugging
- Robotics fundamentals — sensing, planning, and control; servo motors, cameras, and encoders
- Robot representations — reference frames, coordinate transforms, and end-effector pose
- Kinematics — forward and inverse kinematics for controlling where the arm moves in space
- AI & game theory — algorithms, game trees, and the minimax solver
- Computer vision & ML — image processing with OpenCV, neural networks, and object detection
What You'll Make
- A robot arm — assembled from 3D-printed parts and hobby servos
- A game simulator — a general framework for simulating board games in Python
- A GUI — a graphical interface for playing tic-tac-toe
- A minimax solver — an AI opponent that plays optimally
- A robot arm interface — Python modules to command the physical arm
- An object detection module — trained to recognize the tic-tac-toe board and pieces