Robot Learning — IFT 6163

GitHub Pages site for Glen Berseth's Robot Learning course (Université de Montréal / Mila).

Live site: https://neo-x.github.io/roble-book/

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Local Development

Gems are installed locally into docs/vendor/bundle (not system-wide).

cd docs
bundle install          # first time only
bundle exec jekyll serve --baseurl ""
# → open http://localhost:4000

The --baseurl "" override prevents the /roble-book production prefix from breaking local links.

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Building the Textbook Content

Textbook chapter prose lives in the companion repo ../RobotLearningLectures/. Run buildbook.sh from the repo root to sync content into this website and verify the build:

./buildbook.sh            # sync all lectures with compiled chapters, then build
./buildbook.sh lec00      # sync only lec00, then build
./buildbook.sh --no-build # sync without building

buildbook.sh copies three things per lecture from ../RobotLearningLectures/<src-name>/:

Source (RobotLearningLectures)	Destination (roble-book/docs)
<src-name>/text.md	_lectures/<src-name>/text.md
<src-name>/figures/	assets/chapters/<src-name>/figures/
<src-name>/chapter.pdf	assets/chapters/<src-name>/chapter.pdf

LaTeX build artifacts (.aux, .log, .tex, .pdf in figures, .mp4, etc.) are excluded from the figures sync.

To add a new lecture chapter, add one line to the LECTURE_MAP in buildbook.sh:

["lec02"]="lec02-IntroToDeepRL"

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Chapter Content Structure

Each lecture that has compiled chapter prose follows this pattern:

1. Header file — docs/_lectures/lecXX.md

Contains only YAML front matter. Do not put prose here — it is a metadata header that links videos, slides, and the chapter together.

---
num: "00"
title: "What Is Robot Learning?"
track: "Foundations"
youtube_id: "1ZuvCWvj0HM"
slides_url: "https://drive.google.com/file/d/…/view"
colab_url:                    # Colab notebook link (leave blank if none)
chapter_url: "/assets/chapters/lec00-WhatIsRobotLearning/chapter.pdf"
chapter_content_include: "chapters/lec00-WhatIsRobotLearning-content.html"
description: >
  One-paragraph summary shown on the index card and lecture page header.
---

• chapter_url — links the "Chapter PDF" button to the compiled PDF in assets/
• chapter_content_include — tells lecture.html which generated HTML fragment to embed as the chapter body

2. Chapter source — docs/_lectures/<src-name>/text.md

Populated by buildbook.sh. Pandoc prose with figures referenced relative to the chapter directory. The Jekyll plugin _plugins/chapter_generator.rb compiles this with pandoc on every build and writes the result to _includes/chapters/<src-name>-content.html.

3. Figures — docs/assets/chapters/<src-name>/figures/

Static image assets served by Jekyll. Referenced in text.md as ../lec00-WhatIsRobotLearning/figures/image.png; the generator rewrites these to /assets/chapters/lec00-WhatIsRobotLearning/figures/image.png in the HTML output.

4. Chapter PDF — docs/assets/chapters/<src-name>/chapter.pdf

Pre-built PDF, linked by the "Chapter PDF" button. Copied from the source repo by buildbook.sh.

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Updating Lecture Metadata

Edit docs/_lectures/lecXX.md front matter only:

Task	Field
Wire up a YouTube video	youtube_id: (the part after ?v=)
Link slides PDF	slides_url: (Google Drive view URL)
Link chapter PDF	chapter_url:
Enable chapter body	chapter_content_include:
Change description	description:

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Enabling GitHub Pages

1. Push this repo to GitHub.
2. Go to Repo Settings → Pages.
3. Under Source, select Deploy from branch.
4. Set Branch: main and Folder: /docs, then save.

GitHub's Jekyll engine builds the site automatically on every push — no local build step needed for deployment.

Live URL: https://neo-x.github.io/roble-book/ (custom domain robotlearningbook.com pending — see PROGRESS.md).

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Related Repositories

Repo	Purpose
../RobotLearningLectures/	Slide sources (talk.md), transcripts, LaTeX chapters — the content that feeds this site
../neo-x.github.io/	Glen's main academic website