A physicists take on robotics: we will learn to understand the way things move, i.e. analytical mechanics, and how to make them move in the way we want them to, i.e. control theory. Two important toy systems are considered: the cart-pole balancing task, which has an analytical solution, and the Acrobot swing-up task, which requires numerical methods. Finally, we will discuss how these techniques may be useful for advanced bipedal robots.