Your Journey To Physical AI
Welcome to Back To Engineering! This is your roadmap from curiosity to building intelligent robots. Whether you're coming from software, AI/ML, or starting fresh, this tech tree organizes everything you need to learn robotics and physical AI in 2026.
How This Works
This isn't a traditional course - it's a choose-your-own-adventure learning path:
- Click any topic card to explore concepts, watch tutorials, and find resources
- Follow the arrows - they show prerequisites (what you need to know first)
- Star-shaped nodes are hands-on projects where theory meets reality
- Color-coded by discipline - Core
#7aa2f7, Electronics#f5b942, Mechanical#93a8b4, Programming#5fbf82, Data Science#b48ce6, AI & ML#f26d6d - Scroll to zoom and drag to pan around the graph
- Hover over nodes to see prerequisite connections glow
Start with Curiosity on the left and work your way right through the eras. Or jump to what interests you - the graph shows what knowledge you'll need.
The Philosophy
My approach mixes practical building with industry best practices. You'll start simple (blinking an LED, cardboard robot arms) and progressively add complexity (ROS 2, AI-driven manipulation, VLAs). Each layer teaches you why we use professional tools, not just how.
By the end, you'll understand the full stack: from servo control to vision-language-action models deployed on real hardware.
Featured Project
Check out the Robot Arm Project to see the full journey: 7 episodes from scratch-built cardboard prototypes to AI-powered LeRobot arms trained on custom datasets.