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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Robotics: Mobility by University of Pennsylvania

3.9
stars
595 ratings

About the Course

How can robots use their motors and sensors to move around in an unstructured environment? You will understand how to design robot bodies and behaviors that recruit limbs and more general appendages to apply physical forces that confer reliable mobility in a complex and dynamic world. We develop an approach to composing simple dynamical abstractions that partially automate the generation of complicated sensorimotor programs. Specific topics that will be covered include: mobility in animals and robots, kinematics and dynamics of legged machines, and design of dynamical behavior via energy landscapes....

Top reviews

TM

Jun 4, 2017

The material itself is worth a few stars. Clearly lots of work has gone into making some interesting interactive matlab demos. some of the quizzes are unnecessarily confusing.

PR

Aug 20, 2017

Very vast and intuitive course.I found all the information required to design my own legged robot ! I will try and design my own . Thank you so much !

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101 - 125 of 140 Reviews for Robotics: Mobility

By Julius S

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Jun 6, 2016

Good course. Stands well in the specialization. It was a bit buggy throughout tho. And the assignments could have focussed more on the control part.

By Barak R

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Mar 29, 2020

course started very very interesting and the first two weeks were great.

exercises were unclear and had a lot of errors making it very frustrating.

By Yiming Z

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Aug 27, 2017

It generally introduced mobility. But could have introduce more about the analytical model of these templates in this master level course.

By Edgar A P R

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May 28, 2020

I liked the course, it helped me understand leg robotics. Although I think the course has to improve the lectures of week 3 and the last.

By Aditya D

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May 22, 2016

Good teachers but a lot of questions in the quizzes were very ambiguous and unrelated to the Course Content.

By Keng-Hui W

•

Jun 6, 2016

There must be something wrong to spend time on google&wiki much more than the course content.

By Jianwen L

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May 26, 2020

I spent more time on this course than the first and second courses, but I learned less.

By Fabio B

•

Jun 26, 2017

Theme of the course is very interesting but teachers are not much didactic.

By NAVGHARE A S N A S

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Apr 21, 2020

A bit more detailed explanation on concepts is required

By Mosaab D

•

Dec 29, 2021

This course is bad compared to other courses like aerial robotics and computational motion planning, it just gives a broad notions about biomechanical ideas that are used in robotics and each video is so condensed but doesn't provide any in-depth analysis which makes you equipped with no additional skills when you complete the course, and for anyone who just want to have a general idea about the topic I wouldn't recommend it either, because it is just too condense (every video is talking about a research article in 3 minutes) and you wouldn't have a good feeling learning, you'll spend most of your time googling things that generally you wouldn't find because they are extracted from research articles.

Another thing is that quizzes are not fun since there are 28 quiz which makes the course a lot less fun

Disadvantages aside, I think this course have opened my eyes to the world of bio-inspired robotics, and i would like to thank those who have worked on it, thank you for providing this

By Sanet G

•

Jun 24, 2016

This course covers very interesting topics, but there are some serious shortcomings in the lectures. Too much information is just omitted or taken for granted. Some of the lecturers are rather inexperienced. Reading or reciting mathematical expressions in a monotonous voice without actually pointing to the visual representation of the lecture material makes it very difficult to follow. Better care should also be taken with the quizzes - if one looks at the comments or questions posted by some learners, it is clear that we simply don't understand the question, or a question is answered correctly in essence , but the quizz expected more (or less) precision without stating so . Finally for some reason the support from Technical Advisors was also lacking in the specific session that I did, contributing to my frustration and rather negative experience of what could be a very good course

By Fernando C

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Apr 8, 2016

The course has a lot of interesting material, but I believe that a few points may be improved:

1) Exercises with Matlab are not programming ones (except for the PD controller). In my opinion, more detailed exercises (with a guide for solving them) would help to understand better the concepts behind the theory. For example, programming a rimless wheel or a SLIP template.

2) The course has a strong emphasis in theory. Some of the lectures were boring an difficult to follow. As I said before, a more practical approach would be more rewarding.

3) Quizzes were sometimes based on intuition, or topics outside of the course, rather than topics learned from the lessons.

On the other side, the TAs were highly involved in the course. In addition, an extensive list of additional resources (books, papers) is a plus.

I believe that the following sessions will be better than the first one!

By karthik r

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Jul 6, 2017

I find the course informative. But it seems like the lectures were really focused bragging about the robots(Hrex,Jerboa,hopping robot etc...) . I'm sure they are good examples and were needed to explain a lot of concepts, but this course doesn't take you through design procedures, how to simulate robots on MATLAB, tuning PID parameters doesn't really help anyone, how to make a simulation on MATLAB?, no information on choosing actuators.I was hoping to design algorithms like in Aerial robotics/Computational motion planning and perception. This course is a collection of data and information. There is hardly any problem solving.

On the brighter side this course give you a different perspective on designing robots and where the present R&D in universities is heading.

By James H

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Apr 10, 2016

This course is a disappointment after the previous two courses in the specialisation. It tries to cover too many topics. As a result it provides a shallow introduction to many topics rather than deep coverage of any one topic. I do not feel I have learnt anything of substance.

Many of the assignment questions are poorly written. To name one example, assignment 3.1.1 question 3 has at least three correct answers, but the grader accepts only one of them. I wasted hours trying to work out why it was marking my answer wrong.

The lectures by the TAs are delivered in a "robotic" tone if you'll pardon the pun. They are reading off an autocue and it shows.

By JT

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Apr 14, 2016

In some ways good, but deeply flawed. The assignments were weakly correlated with the lectures, and no explanation was given for correct answers or for incorrect answers.

I believe the authors would have benefited greatly from getting outside feedback from an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate student, rather than each other.

By Nicola P

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May 13, 2017

This course provides a lot of informations in a very superficial way. The lack of handouts for most of the lectures doesn't help the learning at all. The abuse of quizzes instead of more comprehensive programming assignments doesn not allow the student to learn through direct experience and usage.

By Adi S

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Sep 30, 2019

I don't think this was a useful course. The content is a very superficial overview of legged mobility ( which is already a niche area) and the quizzes/exercises were often poorly worded and ambiguous. I wouldn't have done this course if it weren't part of the Robotics Specialization track.

By Gasser N

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Jul 29, 2019

the material in this course are explained briefly ,there is no projects like the other courses or programming assignments to understand the concept ,it is just a theoretical course and poorly explained concepts

By Ricky D

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Sep 30, 2016

I feel that the lecture material lacks proper explanation of the key concepts but the questions in quizzes are good although the lectures should have been more conceptual rather than theoretical

By Carlos M C

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Oct 17, 2016

Not the best course of the serie. It is a pity because I had great expectation in this course.

By Muhammad R F D

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Apr 5, 2020

Things are not as much explained as required for beginners.

By Enrique M P

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Apr 5, 2022

Lectures were good but the quizzes were barely related

By Sj

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Apr 17, 2016

Poorly structured.

Bloated.

Discontinuous content.

By Abdullah B

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Aug 13, 2016

Loads of room for improvement

By Eduardo K d S

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Sep 4, 2016

This is the worst course online I've done so far. I would not recommend it to anyone as it stands, regardless of the student's background, this course is just poor and lacking.

The premise of this course is a promising one, the topic is still in its infancy and seems very interesting. Having said that, this is about everything positive that I can say about this course.

For starters, the videos seem good at first, but later it becomes very superficial and monotone. The content is many times just rushed through and it's visible that the lecturers at several occasions have difficulty even to read their own slides!

However, the worst part of the course are the quizzes. There are 24 graded quizzes in total, to pass the course you need to pass all 24 of them! To make matters worse, the minimum passing marks for each quiz is 80%, that wouldn't have been such an issue if most quizzes had 5 or more questions, which is not the case, most of the quizzes have 4 or less questions. This is such an unreasonable requirement, if you miss only one question in a quiz with 3 questions there's already no chance to pass the course!

The content of each quiz is also very troublesome, we are essentially being graded for trivia, a considerable number of the questions are very superficially related to not related at all to the subject of each lecture. Instead of using the questions to delve deeper into the topic at hand, they only create confusion with futilities. A little example, the topic of a subject was about the mechanical properties of using multiple templates and a question in its quiz was about an electric circuit that is never shown in the question itself, only briefly shown in the lecture video for about 10s, minimal information is given without any explanation of what they mean and we are asked to enter a formula as the answer for which also almost no information is given about which notation we should use for the formula itself.

There are other cases where there are multiple choice questions which have incorrect answers accepted by the grader. In one instance, two of the options available are contradictory to each other, however the accepted answer was the one involving both. In another instance, there was more than one solution available to an answer, however the grader accepted only one and there was no information in the question itself to narrow down the possible answers to the desired one.

Finally, there is no active community by the TA and professors, I have never had a single answer form a TA or professor, only sporadical replies from a mentor, who has no authority to fix any issue by him or herself.

All these issues just point to how poorly this course was designed. It had such high hopes, but they fell short flat. In doing this course, I found myself reverse engineering most of the questions just to try to find an accepted answer and try to understand what it meant. The imposed 8-hour period between attempts at the quizzes only hindered my progress. I was focused and engaged in studying for each quiz, however, after 3 failed attempts I had an imposed break period that makes little sense. In the end, this course only made me feel like the very object of my learning: a robot.

I am really disappointed with this course.