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

Some topics were explained in a shallow manner. I suggest providing detailed lecture notes besides the videos for students trying to understand math and physics behind the concepts introduced in videos

The course is awesome in terms of topics covered. But the pace is too fast. moreover the lectures are not comprehensive. It is needed to put more material or refer some notes or books that might help

Provides a good over view but would it be more helpful if the instructor could make better connection between his speech and equations presented in slides. These two seem not to be well connected.

I think there is need to provide clearer instructions on how to get the programming assignments done. The course content is good, but doing the programming assignments needs to be more clarified.

I had problems with lots of small inconsistencies in notations...

I prefer courses which are mathematically more precise, and develop the material more systematically.

The course covered very interesting topics, but it would have preferred more detailed explanation of PD controllers and especially how to choose the tuning constants.

This course requires some prerequisite courses， so it's a little bit hard for people like me who don't actually have these requirements.

Not for those with no background in advanced engineering math. Expect to pick up independently most of the things that are being taught.

very clear explanation with right content organization in lectures, but some assignments are too tricking and hence very time consuming

Includes advanced mathematics, I can only recommend this course to students who have a greater understanding of programming and math.

All the materials are good except for programming assignments that are too industrious and require too many hit and trials methods

lectures and assignments are sometimes parallel in content.

more lectures and videos needed for programming assignments

The course explains the fundamentals of robotics well. The matlab programming was very difficult for a basic learner.

The assignments have lots of confusing typos, and I feel that the material is covered too briefly in the lectures

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lectures and materials are inadequate to complete assessments.

Please include supplementary materials on controller tuning.

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

Complex math, but fair and interesting

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