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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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1 - 25 of 140 Reviews for Robotics: Mobility

By Marc I

•

Dec 15, 2018

This course was disappointing. Instead of taking a methodical approach to describing and analyzing legged robot mobility, the videos haphazardly meandered through various research papers, alternating between poorly explained one-off equations from the paper and top level poorly explained discussions of behaviors. The quizzes were downright awful - poorly worded questions that ended up making me randomly guess on many answers. I learned much less than I had hoped for in this class. Perhaps some of this had to do with the fact that mobility is still very much an area of active research, but the basic concepts and analysis could have been presented in a much more understandable fashion. Sorry but this class needs a lot more work on the part of the instructors to make it useful.

By Simon W

•

Apr 15, 2018

One of the worst courses I took online, but still better as some courses at brick and mortar universities.

The Good:

This courses provides a reasonable comprehensive overview of locomotion for robots. Covering real-world (lab) robots gives a good inside of recent and current research.

The Bad:

The presentation style is very superficial and there is no teaching involved. The underlying educational goals are questionable.

The Ugly:

Most of the quizzes are totally disconnected from the lectures. They either consists of looking up some information on Wikipedia (often with links provided) or tuning a provided matlab script. If you have to pass all exams for the robotics specialization this is an awful experience.

This course covers important topics and therefore it should be rebuild from scratch!

By 刘宇轩

•

Dec 13, 2017

I have to take this course because I would like to go for the capstone. This course is so poorly-designed. Don't expect to learn much from it.

By Abhi S

•

Dec 3, 2018

I really did not learn anything in this course. There was no problem solving that I had to do to pass the quizzes. Its just a bunch of information thrown at you without any context or proper explanation. This is an important course and it should be redesigned from the bottom up to help learners get a good understanding of concepts related to Robotic Mobility.

By Bartłomiej L

•

Jun 4, 2018

The knowledge gained through this course makes all the pains worth it in general.

I honestly wasted so much time on the terrible grading system, it is unbelievable. Looking at the forum, the course is not being fixed even though there are so many problems known for quite some time.

This could have easily been the best course I've done so far. It teaches a lot. I loved the biomechanics analogies to motion in robots.

It is a bit like a zen training - it grants you the gift of patience.

In general I would do this course again. My mark represents the tuttors not fixing any of the problems the community asks them to.

By Rangel I A W

•

Oct 24, 2016

The course is not bad, but the information of the slides doesn't gives you much information to solve the questions. You have to go to other resources to solve the math questions.

The simulations are OK, very practical and comprehensive but there is no math information about the movement or equations of motion on the slides, off course, if you have the matlab code you can do reverse engineering and aim the goal. If you expect to learn about robotics motion and mobility you have to go to other books of these themes.

There are too much questions in my opinion and are tedious to solve or answer.

By Bill T

•

Sep 11, 2016

The material in the quizzes is not adequately described in the lectures or notes. Some of the quizzes require 100% to complete with some problems being quite difficult. Most importantly, I do not believe the course leaves behind an effective understanding of the material that would allow you to apply it. I thought the aerial course was much better.

By Manoj R

•

Aug 4, 2018

Very detailed course covering many different topics/aspects of limbed robotics. Plenty of connections with previous research. Lots of inspiration and comparison with biological system.

Presentations by Prof Koditschek's grad students are quite dense and fast-moving and many of the terms are hard to understand upon first contact.

Some quizzes have funny passing criteria - 80% required to pass in a 3-question quiz is effectively stating that we need to get all questions correct.

The Matlab exercises were very instructive. While they provided an opportunity to develop intuition about the problem, I would have appreciated more exercises that would allow us to develop practitioner's ability. But I do realize that this would be difficult to auto-grade.

By Vladimir B

•

Feb 15, 2019

Lectures by young guys were very poorly prepared. They were just reading from the script - very fast and without explaining, just reading at the same pace...

By Rishabh B

•

May 6, 2016

I think this was a poorly structured online course. Especially for someone who is attempting this course having experienced two excellent previous courses in the specialization. It was good only in few patches but the link was seriously missing. I realize this area is a bit more advanced but with all due respect to the knowledgeable instructors, they could have emphasised more on basic building blocks rather than cramming in so much information which my bandwith couldn't handle it. I did guesswork in almost all the quizzes after week 2 which further adds to my disappointment.

I think the Robotics specialization is better off without this course because there is little or no value addition here. Expecting a lot better from the next course in the series.

By Csongor S

•

Apr 29, 2019

Vague content, quiz and programming assignments not exactly related to video lecture content.

By TKor78

•

Oct 21, 2016

If you love to see a couple of entertaining movies about robots and some interesting concepts about them, grab some popcorn and take this course, because, hey, it’s about cool robots!!

If you are crazy enough and actually want to learn something new or even consider to get the certificate, I would not recommend to participate in this course. The videos are quite ok and cover a good part of what I think this course should be about. But there are a bunch of quizzes, which are sometimes quite off the lecture material and you have to research a lot to get all of the questions right. I managed to solve all quizzes in the end, but it was some kind of a frustrating and discouraging process.

By Luis A D R

•

Dec 9, 2018

I was a little bit disappointed with this course. In comparison to other courses in the specialization program. This course is mostly informative, homework is mainly multiple choice question which can be solving by guessing the answers.

The class is mostly teach by different assistants who do a GREAT job, but I was expecting more from the main professor.

By Deleted A

•

Aug 11, 2017

The worst course I took in Coursera. The majority of the quizes are vaguely explained in the lectures, or not explained at all. Lots of research needed, bugs on the codes and assignments and many boring videos. I don't understand why it stays available. If you can, don't waste your money in this one, go for other Robotics courses.

By Alessandro P d M

•

Aug 17, 2018

Not many relevant information. It was really superficial and I don't think I learned much.

By Raffaele G

•

May 22, 2016

Despite the arguments of this module are extremely interesting and very useful for Robotics, I think the way they are treated is very poor.

In my opinion lectures are so superficial that it is almost a waste of time to follow them.

Lectures are completely useless and most of the time quizzes are note related with them.

In order to solve quizzes you have not only to recover prior knowledge, that it is obvious, but also to search for new arguments somwhere in the web, in some other courses where contents are better treated and explained. In that contest what are the quizzes, what should quizzes have to test if no content is given?

Moreover it often happen that without a clear support from the lectures, questions are confused and ambiguous. It is quite difficult to follow the teaching path and to enrich my knowledge.

I think it is a very bad way to make a course and often the pleasure to follow disappears leaving a sense of frustration and futility.

I arrived at the end of the course just because I'm doing the specialization otherwise I would have left in the middle of the first week.

I'm very disappointed.

By Keith C

•

Jun 21, 2020

Terribly put together. Unclear questions that are poorly worded and confusingly presented at best. Most of this is a high level overview, but I can't tell whom this is for. It tries to present complicated concepts, but then never has you actually do anything with the mathematics for that concept. Then you have issues where what they do ask you about is either only briefly mentioned or some abstract notion that doesn't actually help you learn how to DO anything of substance. A complete waste of time.

By Arshad

•

Jan 8, 2021

Tough this course was relatively though as compared to other Coursera courses but I really liked the contents. There were some gaps in syllabus but I believe that these gaps are unavoidable when you are compelled to introduce state-of-the-art research material in limited time course designed for fundamental studies. Students need to go to other sources to fill these gaps which consume extra time. I particularly liked the touch with nature and comparison of robotic vs animal gait maneuvers. Thumbs up for the whole team and thanks a lot for a fabulous effort.

By Nada A A

•

Aug 1, 2020

This course was challenging and interesting. It offers a special level of knowledge that is not written in classical textbooks and is up-to-date with the recent literature in the field of robotics mobility. I recommend the participants in this course to do some related activity such as design a mobility mechanism for a robot or go deeper with in reading related research papers to benefit from the course more.

By Enrico A

•

Jul 2, 2017

This course deals with robotic mobility, in particular covering legged robots. The topic is covered in detail, with a focus on practical applications from a research perspective. The amount of work required is extensive, with a greater load as compared with usual courses. Nevertheless, you are really able to learn the state of the art in robot locomotion.

By Walt O

•

Oct 29, 2022

I am giving it 5 stars because I really appreciate the efforts of the individuals involved. As for the course itself, I think they can do more, but considering the course is to explain really difficult and complex ideas to babies, well not so well, but what do I know?

Big thanks and it wasnt easy but worth the journey.

By Abhishek B

•

Oct 28, 2018

One of the foremost things I liked about the course was the insight on biomechanics and their applications to real-world robots, such as the ones at Boston Dynamics. The course presents a lot of contemporary work along with giving details of how legged mobility came to it's current form over years of research!

By Abhilash

•

Jun 25, 2016

A tough course,yet agood one if you are persistent. The materials and some Quizzes seems out of touch,you will be searching all over the web for answers because the lectures simply wont have those answers,This is a fairly high level intro to mobility ,you must be persistent .to complete this .

By UMAR T

•

Mar 2, 2020

It provides foundation of basic concepts such as Kinematics, Bipeds, composition of verticals hoppers. At the ens of some assignments, the quizzes will test your knowledge if you comprehend and grasp the concepts of subject matter Some minor Matlab programming required in this course.

By Siddhant Y

•

Nov 12, 2018

Excellent Course. The videos are very interesting and keep you hooked. The supplementary material and the videos by the Doctoral candidates are also worth praise. Professor Koditschek does a great job of conveying the maximum amount of content in the duration available.