Glossary

This glossary defines key terminology used throughout the "Physical AI & Humanoid Robotics" course.

Terms

Physical AI: Artificial intelligence systems operating and interacting directly within physical environments, utilizing sensors for perception and actuators for action execution.

ROS 2 (Robot Operating System 2): Open-source middleware suite for robot software development, providing tools, libraries, and conventions for constructing complex robotic systems.

Gazebo: Powerful 3D robot simulator enabling testing and refinement of robotic creations in virtual environments.

Unity: Real-time 3D development platform used for creating interactive experiences, including robotics simulations.

NVIDIA Isaac Sim: Scalable robotics simulation application and synthetic data generation tool built on NVIDIA Omniverse, designed for developing and testing AI-powered robots.

VSLAM (Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping): Technology enabling robots to construct maps of unknown environments while simultaneously tracking their own locations within them, primarily using visual sensor data.

Nav2: ROS 2 Navigation Stack, a modular framework for autonomous robot navigation, providing tools for path planning, obstacle avoidance, and localization.

Whisper: Open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR) system developed by OpenAI, capable of transcribing audio into text and translating languages.

LLM (Large Language Model): Type of artificial intelligence model trained on vast amounts of text data, capable of understanding, generating, and processing human language.

URDF (Unified Robot Description Format): XML file format in ROS describing robot's kinematic and dynamic properties, visual appearance, and collision model.

SDF (Simulation Description Format): XML file format used in Gazebo describing robots, environments, and other objects in simulations.

MDX (Markdown with JSX): Extension of Markdown allowing embedding JSX components directly within Markdown documents, commonly used in Docusaurus.

CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): Set of practices enabling rapid and reliable software delivery by automating build, test, and deployment processes.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines): Set of guidelines for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. Level AA is common target for compliance.

(Additional terms will be incorporated as content evolves.)