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

4.5
stars
3,029 ratings

About the Course

How can we create agile micro aerial vehicles that are able to operate autonomously in cluttered indoor and outdoor environments? You will gain an introduction to the mechanics of flight and the design of quadrotor flying robots and will be able to develop dynamic models, derive controllers, and synthesize planners for operating in three dimensional environments. You will be exposed to the challenges of using noisy sensors for localization and maneuvering in complex, three-dimensional environments. Finally, you will gain insights through seeing real world examples of the possible applications and challenges for the rapidly-growing drone industry. Mathematical prerequisites: Students taking this course are expected to have some familiarity with linear algebra, single variable calculus, and differential equations. Programming prerequisites: Some experience programming with MATLAB or Octave is recommended (we will use MATLAB in this course.) MATLAB will require the use of a 64-bit computer....

Top reviews

IT

Oct 22, 2017

The course is very good.

The classes are well taught and show general concepts. It is necessary to do research on the internet, to solve the assignments. This is not a bad thing in my point of view

ST

Jun 8, 2018

I think this is very good course of aerial robotics research. Being a student of robotics, I feel that some of stuffs in this course needs a good background in control and mechanical engineering.

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676 - 700 of 737 Reviews for Robotics: Aerial Robotics

By Deleted A

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Aug 7, 2018

Otherwise good course. But too many equations are thrown and assignments require you to do unnecessary labor

By M. E D

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Feb 15, 2016

Good ,but many complaints regarding PID tuning from students need to be addressed in the upcoming sessions

By Bernard W

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Oct 15, 2018

I my opinion to much focused on mathematics & matlab use , lot of time wasted in PD tuning .

By jameel a

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Feb 27, 2017

would of liked to see more programming examples in the lectures. But all in all, fun course!

By FARIS I H H

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Dec 19, 2023

more practical and matlab tutorials could be more helpful, few supplementary material

By Claudio S D M

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Jan 30, 2016

The course should be longer, more detailed and with more background lectures

By Alicia Z B

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Sep 22, 2023

Stopped partway through because the course content was pretty outdated.

By Vinh Q T

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Jul 8, 2023

First 2 weeks are easy to understand. The last two are very hard.

By Nishranth S

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Jun 6, 2018

I feel the course could have been made more interactive and fun.

By Ari C

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Nov 17, 2017

Lectures and materials are inadequate to complete assessments.

By Ravi K

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Feb 15, 2016

Please include supplementary materials on controller tuning.

By Mihimo

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May 29, 2016

At the end I do not feel that I have learned something.

By Joaquin R

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Sep 5, 2018

Complex math, but fair and interesting

By Nabeel U R N

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Jul 25, 2021

Hard if you aren't taking Calc2.

By Xingyu H

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Apr 14, 2021

outdated

By John T

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Mar 12, 2016

A tough score, which I have mixed feelings about as there was good stuff in here too. The course material is interesting and moves at a robust pace and I do think they have made an effort despite the fact that much of it appears lifted from one PhD student's dissertation. Realistically I would not recommend this course if you don't have a STEM Bachelor's degree and you will likely find it painful if you have been away from your degree more than three years. None of this is bad, although the material would have benefitted by being spread out by perhaps two more weeks as realistically people who have been in the workplace a long time may need more time, and have less time per week with family commitments. Unfortunately there are a number of areas that need work:

1 - Inconsistencies and errors in the material. Certain unexplained suffixes in equations and worse, changes in the suffixes without indication that they changed or what they are. I don't feel that this was particularly widespread but it did result in some loss of confidence in the course and time being wasted "interpreting"

2 - Tests throughout the course that often provide the relatively limited feedback of "correct well done" or worse I'm sorry to say, the relatively useless feedback "sorry that is not correct", without ANY explanation of why it was correct or more importantly what an incorrect answer should have been and why. I can understand that this will hopefully drive students should do more research, but if they hit a wall, realistically they're going to keep iterating on the answers until you pass and learn nothing because of the time pressure to complete by the end of the week. I wonder if there is a better mechanism that can be used here

3 - TA Support - The lack of TA support coupled with some concern about a history of errors led the students to believe that there was an error in week 3. For 10 days students went back and forth debating which one of the two equations that were supposedly doing the same thing but with missing terms were correct. NOT ONCE did a TA wake up and step in. In the end one of the students flagged the video as "inappropriate" to wake the UPenn organization up. The TA then stepped in and said (I paraphrase) "oh, we just dropped those terms because they're not so important, but we didn't mention that..." If you are not going to adequately support the students, the material had better be bullet-proof and show some linear thinking

4 - The last exam. Keep in mind if you do this course, you had better be comfortable with calculus, linear algebra, vector math/mechanics and it would be helpful to have a head start in Matlab. That said, the last question in the last exam, was an order of magnitude more challenging than everything else set and almost felt like a "shake out" question. I passed the course and had a good understanding of the material, but I suspect that the folks that did, made it through that last question in multiple random fashions. The material itself is relatively academic and the trajectory topic was definitely so. Unfortunately the one example (jerk trajectory) provided appears to have left a lot of students feeling very unsupported based on feedback I saw, and would probably benefit from having an example more fully worked through. As for the final exam, it would be highly desirable for UPenn to provide insight into how they would have solved the last part of the last question as my concern is that there is a whole contingent of people who did this course who didn't come away with as good a grounding on trajectories as they may believe they have

By Antón

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Mar 15, 2016

This course successfully covers the mechanics and control topics of quadrotors. The course also points to some resources in order to extend your study on UAVs. However, there are some issues concerning the assignments which I didn't like at all:

1. Big gap in difficulty between assignments of first three weeks compared with the assignment of the fourth week.

2. The difficulty of the assignments of the first three weeks just relied on sweeping (somewhat 'smartly') a 1,2,3, or 6 dimensional parametric space. I guess that real UAVs engineers are not paid for this. In some assignment, I had to edited a file which I was not supposed to edit in order to pass it.

3. The last assignment was quite frustrating for the following reasons

3a. Really long running times to test if the parameters work fine. I would sacrifice the fancy real-time visualization to save some time. Apart from long running times, I guess that UAVs are not solving ODEs in real time on board, so I think is more interesting a more practical/real-time approach.

3b. Search in a 12-dimensional parametric space (some parameters are equal, but still you end up tunning 5,6 independent parameters, which influence each other). Come on, is this useful? I am sure that UAVs engineers don't spend their hours in this kind of crappy search. You could explain at least some existing heuristics when having so many control parameters to tune.

3c. Even though the drone trajectory seems to fit perfectly the planned trajectory, you might not pass the exercise, and you would get some clueless messages telling you the final position/velocity is not correct.

3d. The assignment guide is very unclear in some parts.

3e. A lot of typos in the formulas of the last part of the guide. I decided to completely ignore it and develop my own strategy, which turned out to be far simpler and easier to implement.

3f. The submission program tests the whole exercise regardless you passed some sections or not, which make the waiting times even longer.

By Glenn B

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Feb 29, 2016

My feeling is that the course creator(s) did not fully prepare and scope of the course materials (i.e., lectures, supporting artifacts, assignments) required for the available time alloted to each week's topic. No syllubus or suggested reading material was available until the course started, which leaves little time to decide on the value of the course or to acquire the reading materials. The lectures glossed over topics that where only minimally supported by brief supplementary lectures provided by the teaching assistants. At the start of the course the lectures and sparse supporting material were only available in video format; not very conducive for detailed review. The student population had to beg for electronic copies of the materials, which became available around the end of the second week of the four week session. The assignments say they require 3 hours, but I would venture to say that most students have spent way more than 3 hours on the assignments just in researching solutions let alone debugging supplied software along with their portion of the assignment. In summary, the topics were interesting however the organization and supporting materials were lacking making for an unsatisfying learning experience.

By Thadeus R

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Mar 14, 2016

This course definitely requires prerequisite knowledge of calculus and matrix math. There is also very little in the way of practical application. The MatLab work is interesting but barely explained. The assignments were nearly impossible without help from other students. Understanding which equations that were shown in the lecture (not necessarily explained) were useful in completing the assignments was not apparent and there was no help from the TAs.

I don't think the assignments were irrelevant but without having a background in academic engineering the course needs to walk through similar exercises with explanations to increase understanding and ability to complete the course.

While I don't think this course was well presented and I can't say I truly learned anything I am glad I was exposed to the material and I will continue with the Specialization.

By Sean M

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Jan 7, 2021

I felt like the course made a poor (albeit, existing) attempt at trying to relate the mathematical equations used to the actual physical world. For this reason it was a bit difficult to follow. Besides that, the inconsistency of the notations is such a small and easy detail to miss but can really mess up the concentration of a student. Some of the later lectures in week 4 were quite boring and chunky and felt like maths was being thrown at me without there being any appreciation of how that can relate to real life. None of the material made me a better engineer besides the section on PID in week 1, the refreshment of eigenvalue calculations and the introduction to MATLAB.

By Antoine L

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Feb 12, 2016

This course feels like a bad news anchorman reading the teleprompter. It gives a lot of formulae without proper explanations. A lot of quiz answers do not come from the video lectures. The course is really just spitting formulae from the dissertation "Trajectory Generation and Control for Quadrotors" by Daniel Warren Mellinger (easily found using search engines). Reading the dissertation before doing the course would probably help understand the formulae they say out of context without the proper explanations. Sorry for the bad review, it's the first time I leave one like that, although I've completed many MOOCs. I hope it will help to improve the course.

By Ataliba M

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Jan 2, 2017

Very poor and a complete lack of interaction from Mentors/Tutors. Learners are left behind shooting bullets at the sky hoping to hit a star that might fall over with some hints. The course materials is consistent and very well informed but, as mentioned mentors/tutors since course began never showed up to clarify some frequent issues with Matlab codes and input data.

Felt disappointed!!!

By Georg W

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Mar 9, 2016

I think this course does not a good job of explaining the mathematics very well. The supplementary material is very good in that regard, compared to the lectures. However, there are too few to make up for it. I would need a few example calculations of similar problems to what we are expected to solve in the exercises.

As a result, my learning success is not very satisfactory.

By Casey L

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Dec 15, 2023

This course is just not well done. The material just skims the surface of the topics. This is the second course I have taken from Penn and the second course that has been poorly done. I'm sorry I can't be more specific but I have enjoyed other courses more and gotten more out of other courses (some for free you YouTube).

By thiago c

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Mar 16, 2018

Quizzes and assignments are not tied well to the lectures. The flow and sequence is not good. The subject is very interesting, but needs to be better organized. the last assignment requires an unreasonable amount of knowledge of Matlab. I code in other languages and I am not a big fan of Matlab which make it even harder.