Robotics

This is the capstone of the Specialized Robotics Applications track, and it pushes every theme from the earlier extreme-environment courses to its limit. Medicine demanded precision, agriculture demanded scale, the ocean demanded autonomy under communication strain, and space demands all three at once with a twist none of the others share: when something breaks, there is usually no one who can go fix it. This course covers what makes space uniquely unforgiving for robotic systems, why the speed of light itself forces spacecraft and rovers to think for themselves, how machines move across alien terrain they can never fully trust, how manipulation works when gravity isn't there to hold anything still, and why the engineering culture around space robotics moves so much slower and more deliberately than everywhere else in the field.