Reddit reviews Probabilistic Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series)

Hmm. I'm not aware of any free lectures (that doesn't mean there aren't any). There is this book, which is quite good (and you can read it online free): http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/

Here's another textbook which I've read that covers many motion planning approaches: Principles of Robot Motion

Personally my favorite robotics book is Probabilistic Robotics, which doesn't really cover motion planning, but includes a lot about sensing and localization that you'll need to build a practical autonomous robot.

I am a computer vision engineer working in a very closely related field.

Read these things and then get back to me:

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/hzbook/

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Vision-Models-Learning-Inference/dp/1107011795 my favorite textbook

http://szeliski.org/Book/drafts/SzeliskiBook_20100903_draft.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Robotics-Intelligent-Autonomous-Agents/dp/0262201623

https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf

http://www.lsi.upc.edu/~robert/teaching/master/material/p5-goldberg.pdf

http://webdiis.unizar.es/~raulmur/MurMontielTardosTRO15.pdf and all cited papers

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23948930/Papers/3DGeometry.pdf

http://users.ics.forth.gr/~argyros/mypapers/2005_10_iccv_levenberg.pdf

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033707.do

Just to add to GreyMX's answer a little bit:


There are embedded IMUs on the market now (e.g. Analog Devices ADIS line) that cost a few hundred dollars, and are small, accurate, and precise enough to do these sorts of tasks. The go-to method for finding the postionand orientation of fixed wing UAVs has been a combination of IMU and GPS, where the translation/rotation information you're looking for is generated by a Kalman filter that is calibrated with a model of the UAV dynamics.



A really good book for getting into these techniques is Probabilistic Robotics:

http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Robotics-Intelligent-Autonomous-Agents/dp/0262201623/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409573217&sr=8-1&keywords=probabilistic+robotics

Sorry, started writing and my power went out, then I kinda forgot to get back to you...
But yeah, There are a few robotics programs out there. At CSM it's an MS in mechanical engineering with the area of study in robotics. CSM has different subsets of mechanical engineering. I found my ME masters to be very helpful but it really depends on what you want to do. Like I mentioned earlier, most of my coworkers at Wolf just finished with a BS. But having a masters will give you a leg up and if you can get funded for it I'd say go for it (teaching assistant, research assistant, or by a company). I'm working towards project engineering and project management but there's also programming, mechanical design, controls, electrical design, and lots of other stuff. Personally, I think most of the advancements in robotics are going to be in the software, more specifically the robot perception.
So as far as what to study now: definitely get good at programming. Mostly C++ and if you get good at one language it's pretty easy to pick up other languages so better to focus and get good at one, and C++ is the most common. Electronics are also huge, circuit design and such. Understanding of voltage, current, motors, etc.
If you're feeling really ambitious and have free time you might look into robot kinematics and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). Kinematics is fundamental for industrial and humanoid robots and SLAM is a key concept for mobile robotics and is starting to show in industrial and humanoid robots. These are two of my favorite books on them. There are free digital copies around too.
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Robotics-Mechanics-Control-Edition/dp/0201543613
http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Robotics-Intelligent-Autonomous-Agents/dp/0262201623
But you're probably busy with other stuff. So, focus on programming, math, and yes, electronics. I also have to do 3D modeling and simulations almost every day at work. We use SolidWorks and RobotStudio.

For Non-Linear systems I love Khaleel. Though I dont remember if he has much on Sliding Mode.

I learned Kalman Filters from [Thrun] (http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Robotics-Intelligent-Autonomous-Agents/dp/0262201623/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348256381&sr=1-1&keywords=probabilistic+robotics). Though he really approaches it from a software perspective and not necessarily controls (they are merging now!). He also has all different flavors of filters, which is awesome.

Here are three that you MUST know:

http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Robotics-Intelligent-Autonomous-Agents/dp/0262201623/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269491705&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Robot-Motion-Implementations-Intelligent/dp/0262033275/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269491705&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Autonomous-Mobile-Intelligent-Robotics/dp/026219502X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c

In fact, when I searched for the first book it brought up a recommendation for all three.

It definitely depends on the topic. For linear control theory, Hespanha has a good book. Slotine is popular for nonlinear control theory. Thrun has a ridiculously popular book for stochastic control. I've been meaning to finish Crassidis' book on estimation theory in general. As for underactuated systems specifically, like motion planning and such, I have not read any particular book, but the course notes for the MIT class I linked are basically a good book.