Hello,
I am a recent mechanical engineering graduate and discovered Julia online. I am interested in simulating and optimizing some custom robotics designs and wanted some input from people who are more experienced with Julia and specifically JuliaRobotics packages.
Would appreciate any advice on getting started with Julia and integrating it with robotic projects! I want to know if I am getting in way too ahead of myself.
Thank you 
I am sure you have seen https://juliarobotics.org.
I have! I was going through some of the tutorials, but it’s taking me a while to understand what is going on and how to utilize it since this is my very first time working with Julia and robot optimization.
I guess I am looking for advice on maybe other areas to help ease the transition into designing dynamic robots.
IIUC, Rigidbodydynamics.jl should be differentiable in all directions, meaning it’s straightforward to obtain gradients and Jacobians for optimization not only of trajectories, but also of the kinematics etc. of the robot.
For the actual optimization there are a lot of resources in the community. Optim.jl is probably the easiest to get started with, but others exist as well.