How the external material informs this edition
This is original teaching material organized around the existing 14-lecture modeling syllabus. It is not a transcript, copy, or official adaptation of a CMU or MIT course. The public course indexes, linked notes, and documentation were used for topic alignment and conventions. The four supplied playlists are companion viewing. Their complete video contents have not been independently reviewed or transcribed, and no video timestamps are asserted.
The source links are recorded with an access date of 11 September 2026. Online notes and stable documentation can change. Preserve a release tag or commit when citing this edition.
CMU dynamics
CMU 16-715 and CMU dynamics notebooks are the week-by-week companions for modeling assumptions, integration, rigid-body kinematics, recursive algorithms, constraints, and contact.
CMU optimal control context
CMU optimal control and CMU 16-745 index supply supporting context for discretization and rotations. They are not the spine of this modeling course.
MIT Underactuated Robotics
MIT Underactuated videos accompanies Tedrake, Underactuated Robotics. MIT multibody dynamics connects free-body and Lagrange derivations to generalized coordinates. We translate their notation into the MuJoCo contract rather than mixing conventions silently.
MIT Robotic Manipulation
MIT Manipulation videos is Robotic Manipulation, Fall 2023. MIT Manipulation notes and MIT differential IK support frame conventions, differential kinematics, and contact examples used in the later weeks.
MuJoCo and other algorithms
MuJoCo computation defines the engine's force decomposition; MuJoCo API supplies function-level links. MuJoCo MJX supports the optional batching material. Pinocchio algorithms and Drake hydroelastic are comparison references for recursive dynamics and distributed contact, not required engines for the core labs.
Rights and reuse
New notes, code, and slides are authored within this repository and retain its existing Apache-2.0 license. Linked lectures, notes, images, and code remain governed by their owners' licenses. This edition does not redistribute external slides, transcripts, figures, or notebook code. A citation is attribution, not permission to copy an entire source.
Each module lists its relevant references in module.yml. Use the references page for the complete linked records, and the citation page to cite this repository.