Course Home¶

GT Cloud Robotics is a Vertically Integrated Projects course at Georgia Tech centered around rapid robotics software prototyping. Students pick a focus area and develop a full demo of a working program every two weeks.

This course is about mobile robots in the real world: air and ground vehicles that have to navigate an unpredictable environment and then carry out a long-horizon task. Not self-driving cars, not robot arms. Those live in structured or controlled settings; the hard part here is staying reliable across a long mission in a world that won't hold still.

How the course works¶

1. Figure out what you're aiming at¶

Before you pick a track, research 5-10 companies with open job postings you'd want and could plausibly get. Pull out the skills they're hiring for. Cross-reference Glassdoor and levels.fyi. My prediction is in the slide 5 of the syllabus deck; check it against what you actually find.

The output is a list of skills you can name. Everything after this is you building evidence for them, every two weeks, for a semester.

2. Pick a track¶

At the start, choose one of the three tracks below as your rough interest area. This is the space you work in for the semester. You're not committing to a single deliverable; you're committing to a problem area. All three tracks build on SPAR, the course's simulation and autonomy starter repo.

Unity & MuJoCo Robotics Simulation — Build simulation environments. MuJoCo owns the physics, Unity owns rendering and world authoring, and the scene is the world. New sites, new sensors, moving agents: the scenarios the other tracks test against come from here.

Behavior Tree Autonomy Platform — Long-horizon autonomy for a robot working unsupervised. You own the behavior layer above the vehicle's motion controller (Nav2 on the ground, PX4 in the air): mission logic, docking when the battery runs low, deciding what to do with what perception reports. Come up with a mission and make the robot do it end to end.

RL & VLA Learning Integration — Bring learned models into the stack. SPAR has the swap points: train a policy in a pure-MuJoCo loop and run it as a behavior node, or put a VLM behind the perception topic. Then evaluate it against the hand-written tree.

3. Ship something every two weeks¶

Work runs in two-week cycles. Each cycle you commit to one thing you can demo, and you show it at the Wednesday sync. If you're on a subteam, you commit as a team. Demoing is mandatory. A demo means it works in front of people: a running node, a passing eval, a vehicle doing the thing in sim. Not slides, not a status update.

If it flops, that's fine. You still get up, share your code, and talk through it: what you were going for, where it broke, and why. A demo that fails and gets explained is worth more than a status update that hides the failure. What isn't acceptable is showing up with nothing.

When a cycle closes, that deliverable is done. You pick a new problem to work on, still inside your track. Over a semester you stack up several distinct, shipped pieces of work rather than one open-ended project that's perpetually "almost there."

4. Background modules (optional)¶

The modules below are optional background reading and context to build up a solid foundation. They're here when you want to go deeper on a topic.

Each one is deliberately close to a take-home technical interview: a scoped problem, tests to pass, and CI that grades every push. If you're stuck, bring it to the weekly sync.

Modules:

1. C++ CLI tooling — CMake fundamentals and the workflow to spin up a useful utility from scratch.

2. System design — who owns what, where the boundaries go, and what a system should do when a sensor goes quiet.

3. Behavior architectures & autonomy — composing behavior with state machines, behavior trees, and planners.

... more coming soon ...

Course logistics¶

Weekly sync / demo day: Wednesdays at 5 PM, in person.

We meet every week in Klaus. Every other week is demo day. You demo what you committed to. Off-week syncs are for getting unstuck, getting feedback on in-progress work, and lining up your next cycle. Attendance is the default expectation, but I'm flexible: if you need to miss for a test, illness, or something else real, just let me know ahead of time.