How to reason from a task to a machine.
Anyone can bolt a motor to a board. Designing an embodied system that actually works is a discipline: reason from the task, down through the body, the senses, the brain, and the policy, and be honest about the gap between simulation and the real world. This is the method — the part that makes maker. an education, not a parts bin.
Task → morphology → sensing → compute → policy → sim-to-real.
Each choice constrains the next. Skip a link and you feel it later — an over-specced brain, a sensor that can't see what the policy needs, a sim that lied to you.
Task
Start from what the robot must do, in the real world, under real constraints — not from the parts you happen to own.
Morphology
Let the task pick the body. Wheels or legs, one arm or two, rigid or soft — form follows the job.
Sensing
Decide what it must perceive to act, and choose the smallest sensor suite that delivers it.
Compute
Size the brain to the policy, not the other way around. Where does inference run, and within what power and weight budget?
Policy
Choose how it decides: scripted, learned by imitation, or trained by reinforcement — and how you'll get the data.
Sim-to-real
Close the gap deliberately. What you can prove in the twin, and what you must test on the bench.
Coming as guided design walkthroughs.
Each phase becomes a hands-on walkthrough that designs a real build in front of you — the trade-offs made out loud, tied to the sim twins and boards on this site.
◱ Writing The Institute's education stack already teaches the learning side — see the courses. This section adds the design side that comes before the first line of code.