lidar

A robot is only as good as what it can measure. Explore the full sensor toolkit — encoders, IMUs, ultrasonic rangefinders, LiDAR, cameras, and force/torque sensors — and learn the four metrics that determine whether a sensor is fit for purpose: resolution, range, noise, and sampling rate.

The chicken-and-egg problem of robot autonomy: to localise you need a map; to build a map you need a pose. Covers front-end matching, back-end pose-graph optimisation, loop closure, and visual vs LiDAR SLAM systems.

How LiDAR fires pulses and measures time-of-flight to build a 3D point cloud; data structures, voxel downsampling, ICP registration, ground segmentation, and an honest comparison with cameras for robot perception.