Robot Learning Companion

An interactive study companion for the ETH Zürich course "Robot Learning: From Fundamentals to Foundation Models" (Spring 2026, Oier Mees, 263-5911-00L). It teaches all 12 lectures deeply — in the explanatory spirit of Karpathy / 3Blue1Brown / Welch Labs — with dense prose, full derivations, and 33 interactive visualizations you can manipulate.

Built for a learner with a strong ML + mathematics (and actuarial) background who is building up the robotics and RL layers. Optional finance/actuarial "bridge" panels map RL ideas onto concepts you may already know.

Quick start

./launch.sh          # installs deps on first run, then starts the dev server
# → http://localhost:5173

Or directly:

npm install
npm run dev          # dev server
npm run build        # production build → dist/
npm run preview      # preview the production build
npm test             # vitest (numeric widget cores)

What's inside

• 15 sections — Start, the Primer (robotics + MDP fundamentals), Lectures 1–12, and a Review mode that aggregates every quiz with live scoring.
• 33 interactive widgets — value iteration, PID, imitation drift, the deadly triad, REINFORCE, PPO clipping, GAE, diffusion/flow-matching, attention, world-model rollouts, SayCan, best-of-N, and more — plus new explainers: softmax/temperature, manipulator dynamics, a derive-it-yourself Bellman widget, and an animated policy-gradient → REINFORCE equation transform.
• Quizzes per lecture, self-checking, with a shuffle/group Review deck.
• KaTeX math, cross-reference auto-linking, progress tracking, and a keyboard-navigable sidebar.

Tech stack

Vite · Vue 3 (<script setup>) · Tailwind CSS · vitest. Math via KaTeX (CDN). Widget motion uses a small in-house SVG/Canvas animation layer (no heavy deps).

Project layout

src/
  sections/     one component per section (StartSection, PrimerSection, L1…L12, ReviewSection)
  widgets/      33 interactive widgets + rllab.js (shared SVG/Canvas drawing helpers)
  logic/        pure, vitest-pinned numeric cores for the widgets (+ *.test.js)
  composables/  useKaTeX, useXref, useProgress, useBridges, useAnimate (motion toolkit)
  components/   Sidebar, TopBar, ProgressBar, Pager, CompleteBar, Lab, Quiz/Question/ReviewDeck
  data/         nav, quizzes, xref tables
  assets/       styles.css (design tokens + component styles)
reference/      frozen single-file original (the migration's golden reference)
tools/drift/    drift/regression harness (inventory + content-diff)
docs/superpowers/  design specs, implementation plans, review backlog, link audit

Deployment (GitHub Pages)

Pushing to main triggers .github/workflows/deploy.yml, which builds and publishes to GitHub Pages. The Vite base path is derived automatically from the repository name (/<repo>/ for a project page, / for a <user>.github.io repo), so no manual configuration is needed. Ensure the repo's Settings → Pages → Source is set to GitHub Actions (the workflow auto-enables this).

To deploy:

git push origin main      # the Actions workflow builds + deploys

License / attribution

Course content and lecture structure belong to ETH Zürich and the course instructors; this companion is an independent study aid built from the public syllabus, papers, and recordings. See the Start page for honest sourcing notes.