Special Topics: Advanced Robotic Navigation
Graduate, WPI Robotics Engineering, 2023
A graduate-level online asynchronous course on autonomous robotic navigation, developed and taught in the Robotics Engineering Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The course runs from basic Bayesian filtering up through marine-grade inertial navigation: recursive state estimation and the Kalman filter, its nonlinear extensions and the particle filter, then strapdown INS mechanization, the reference frames it lives in, IMU error modeling and error budgeting, and GNSS/INS integration — closing with what to do when GNSS isn’t available.
The emphasis throughout is on navigation as an engineering discipline rather than a collection of filters: error budgets, observability, sensor selection, and knowing which assumptions your estimator is quietly making about the world.