Robotics Education Just Got Easier
Viam is bringing free robotics education to the public, whether you're a novice robot enthusiast or a company launching commercial robotics.
Published August 23, 2026
Viam 101 is a free course to help educate robotics developers across a wide range of skill levels.
Viam, the software platform for robotics and automation, announced Viam Education, a free, developer-first education program designed to help engineers build on the Viam platform. Viam Education brings together a series of free online courses, live events, hackathons, and NYC office hours to make building robotics applications more accessible than ever.
The program is designed to serve a wide range of experience levels, from those experimenting with hardware for the first time to large companies moving from prototype to deployment in commercial settings. No prior robotics experience is required. Viam 101, the introductory course, is a free, self-paced online course that provides a practical foundation for building robots and physical AI applications. In 90 minutes, the course walks through the three fundamental concepts behind modeling a physical space in software and programming a robotic arm to avoid obstacles and perform a useful task. By the end, students will have built a working robotics application in simulation and be ready to build their own robot. Over 800 developers signed up ahead of the launch.
"For a long time, building robots required deep hardware expertise. That's changing fast," said Shannon Bradshaw, SVP of Product and Education. "Today, any software engineer can build sophisticated robotics applications with the right tools. Viam Education helps developers get there fast, giving them the practical skills to build real-world robotics applications."
Viam is built for how software engineers already work. The platform provides hardware controllers and services such as motion planning, computer vision, and data capture and sync, exposing everything through clean, consistent APIs so developers can write control logic in Python, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, or C++ without the need to interface with lower-level infrastructure. The same code that runs in simulation runs on real hardware.
Viam Education reflects Viam's broader belief in a software-first approach to robotics. The program will also include live events and hackathons where developers can build on the platform, experiment with hardware, and learn directly from Viam engineers and partners.
