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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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426 - 450 of 737 Reviews for Robotics: Aerial Robotics

By JhonSmith Y

May 15, 2016

Me encanta

By usama b k

May 17, 2020

excellent

By Sergio M A

May 2, 2018

very good

By Siva P

Sep 14, 2017

wonderful

By Khurram M

Nov 22, 2016

Excellent

By Aditya M D

Sep 10, 2016

Its great

By Bruno E F

Feb 26, 2016

Perfect !

By Gayatri N

Nov 24, 2021

Amazing!

By Zi-Jia G

Sep 26, 2022

Great!

By Bálint - H F

Mar 20, 2019

Great !

By Emil S

Aug 1, 2017

awesome

By m q

Nov 29, 2016

awesome

By Abel G P

Jan 26, 2019

Genial

By Robert R

Apr 30, 2017

super!

By Anshul S

Apr 20, 2021

Great

By jesus r h

Mar 7, 2017

great

By Sartono i f

Nov 7, 2022

good

By Samya C

Sep 9, 2020

GOOD

By RYAN A L L

Mar 7, 2023

.

By Владимир А

Jan 29, 2016

О

By Ananda R

Jul 10, 2020

This course is a great course for beginners who are stepping into the world of robotics and the perfect course to start a specialization. The course content is exciting and there are a lot of instructional concepts. However, I was not satisfied with the way the content was presented. Being used to the chalk and talk environment, and following online videos where the tutor writes the equations on the screen as they go through them, the " PPT slides and voiceover" method did not attract my attention. But the content of the course kept me going. I found some of the qualitative quiz questions quite difficult as they were not taught in the class explicitly.

Understanding quadrotors, I see that there could not be much done when it comes to programming tasks. Programming tasks Weeks 2 and 3 were extremely easy to code, but tuning the PD gain parameters was the most infuriating task. Even when I got the correct code for Week 3, I was doubting whether I made any mistakes in the code for a long time while the issue was caused by a bad PD gain ratio. The tuning part could be removed by providing a considerable range of possible values of the gains. This would save a lot of wasted time. That being said, I found the final task to be insanely interesting and the satisfaction of solving the final task was extraordinary. I would also appreciate the work done in creating the simulation model and the way the quadcopter was visualized and the trajectory was plotted.

Overall, this course pretty much teaches you all the basic theory you need to know to control a quadrotor. If you dont mind wasting a few hours tuning 6-8 values, you would walk out of this course with great satisfaction.

PS: There are a few videos of quadrotors doing insane stunts both as a swarm and individually inside the course.

By Eduardo K d S

Jul 20, 2016

I really enjoyed this course and it really hooked me onto this topic, definitely this will not be the last robotics course I am going to follow. That being said there are some points of improvement.

The main parts necessary to program the simulation assignments are covered in the materials, but there are still some of them that need to be pursued independently. Some assumptions have to be made that are not so obvious, I do not know whether it is the intention of this course to do so or not, but since they are minor footnotes that may hinder completely your results, I think they should be made explicit.

The Matlab files available for the course work as intended, what is not so obvious though is how they are intended to work, that is because there is very little documentation about them, it would be great if there was more documentation available, especially for people who have never used such tools before.

Finally, even though I personally enjoyed this course and I think it had an achievable level of challenge for me, I would definitely not recommend this course for total beginners, or people who do not have followed a math, physics or engineering degrees. The way the course is laid out, even if you do not understand the concepts behind each topic you will still manage to answer the quizzes and get the simulations to work eventually, however to truly understand what they mean and be able to replicate them in other environments requires some prior knowledge that cannot be taught in just a few hours.

By JJ W

Mar 5, 2016

I really enjoyed this course and felt the material was appropriate in scope and quality for an introduction to Aerial Robotics. I have a few issues with it though.

While this wasn't a problem for me, I feel those who haven't done maths with vectors and matrices before would struggle with the maths presented here.

There was some inconsistency in notation throughout the lectures - though I expect this will be fixed in future runs of this course.

Given how much the programming assignments involved tuning PD controllers, I think there should have been some additional material provided on how to go about doing this.

The difficulty of the last programming assignment came out of nowhere and given that you need to pass all the assignments in order to pass the course, this made it especially stressful. Having gotten almost full marks on the course until that point, the prospect of that all being for naught because I couldn't complete the final assignment in time was incredibly stressful and unfair. The simulation would fail with a Matlab ode45 error - with absolutely no information as to why that should fail. Trying to debug something by guesswork on a time limit is not a valuable educational experience.

I feel all of these issues are fixable though and on balance I think this was a very good course.

By Enrico A

Jun 15, 2017

I really liked this course, as it presents a researcher's insight into simple, but effective quadcopter motion planning and control strategies. I think this course does require some background engineering knowledge. The last assignment was particularly challenging and really enjoyed. However, I have the following recommendations: 1) the time required for the assignments should be increased to realistic values. Although I found the provided PDFs (in addition to the lectures) useful, it still took time to derive the matrix equation for the snap-trajectory coefficients based on the boundary conditions. Unless the equations are provided in some form, I would suggest a minimum of 9 hours for that assignment. 2) all assignments entail some tuning of coefficients for PD controllers. It can be very confusing to obtain those values, especially if you are not sure what you have done is right and what sort of values to look at. For this reason, I recommend to add an extra step per assignment where the controller is run for a fixed point. That way it is clear from the marker if the equations are correct. Then, a document should be provided on sound strategies for obtaining the coefficients, without a need to look at the blogs all the time.

By Alexandru S

Feb 9, 2016

Overall a good course. But I would suggest the following updates:

-there are many formulas in the course that are not explained, just dropped in the slides

-there are many inconsistencies in notations (for instance the Kv, Kp used sometimes, other times Kd and Kp)

-programming labs should be given in an incremental approach; ex. instead of just requesting a full solution for a given problem, a stepwise approach where the functions are built up to produce intermediate results and slowly add complexity to reach that final goal is much more efficient as a learning tool

-supplementary notes are not available

-slides for the main lectures are available but they are attached to the videos; it would be better if they are added as an item in the course outline. Many other courses on Coursera do the same thing. Also it would spare the presenter to break down the slide pack into parts corresponding to the videos; just place the whole slide pack for a lesson.