SKILL TOMES
Core tomes in reading order — absorb them chapter by chapter; each chapter grants XP toward the stat its discipline feeds. Tomes you own are BOUND artifacts — their chapters pay +25% XP. The free tomes come bound; the rest bind when you acquire a legitimate copy.
CORE TOMES — ABSORB IN THIS ORDER
Kevin Lynch & Frank Park · Gate 1–2 · FREE DROP · +30 XP per chapter
THE spine of the whole plan. Screw-theory kinematics → dynamics → trajectory generation → control → wheeled robots. Free PDF + full video lecture series + Coursera exercises. Everything the humanoid needs starts here.
「A Tour of C++ (3rd ed)」
Bjarne Stroustrup · Gate 1 · +30 XP per chapter
You know Python; robotics runs on C++ (ROS 2, PX4, firmware). 250 pages, written by the language's author, respects your time. Read alongside the Udemy C++ course.
「Practical Electronics for Inventors (4th ed)」
Paul Scherz & Simon Monk · Gate 1–2 · +30 XP per chapter
Your EE/electronics gap-filler: circuit theory, transistors, op-amps, power supplies, motors, MCUs — written for people who build, not for exams. The bench reference for every wiring decision on both robots.
Karl Åström & Richard Murray · Gate 1–2 · FREE DROP · +30 XP per chapter
Free, modern, state-space-first control theory. Sharpens the M.Tech controls you already have into the form drone attitude loops and humanoid balance controllers actually use.
「Making Embedded Systems (2nd ed)」
Elecia White · Gate 2 · +30 XP per chapter
How real firmware is architected: drivers, interrupts, state machines, debugging without a debugger. Bridges the Arduino-toy level to the STM32/flight-controller level.
「Probabilistic Robotics」
Sebastian Thrun, Wolfram Burgard & Dieter Fox · Gate 2–3 · +30 XP per chapter
State estimation is what separates robots that work from robots that demo. Bayes filters, Kalman/EKF, particle filters, SLAM. The drone's EKF and any localization you ever do come from here.
Randal Beard & Timothy McLain · Gate 2–4 · FREE DROP · +30 XP per chapter
The drone bible: aircraft dynamics, autopilot design layer by layer, state estimation, path following. The companion 'mavsim' Python repo lets you build the whole autopilot yourself before touching PX4 internals.
「Hands-On Machine Learning (3rd ed)」
Aurélien Géron · Gate 3 · +30 XP per chapter
The fastest respectable route to deep-learning fluency: end-to-end projects, CNNs, training tricks, deployment. You've used YOLO as a tool; this makes you the person who trains it.
Richard Sutton & Andrew Barto · Gate 3 · FREE DROP · +30 XP per chapter
Free, canonical RL. Part 1 (ch. 1–8) is mandatory before training any locomotion policy — otherwise PPO is a black box you can't debug when the humanoid learns to fall creatively.
Russ Tedrake (MIT) · Gate 3–5 · FREE DROP · +30 XP per chapter
Free MIT course-book on dynamic locomotion: walking models, trajectory optimization, RL for control. This is the humanoid track's graduate school. Videos + runnable notebooks included.
REFERENCE SHELF — CONSULT, DON'T GRIND
「The Art of Electronics (3rd ed)」
Horowitz & Hill · Gate ref · +30 XP per chapter
Not a cover-to-cover read — the reference you consult when Scherz & Monk isn't deep enough. Buy used/later.
Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville · Gate ref · FREE DROP · +30 XP per chapter
Free theory reference for when Géron says 'it works' and you want to know why.
「Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (2nd ed)」
Siegwart, Nourbakhsh & Scaramuzza · Gate ref · +30 XP per chapter
Optional breadth: locomotion, perception, SLAM, planning for mobile robots. Skim if the drone perception work pulls you toward SLAM.