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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Modern Robotics, Course 1: Foundations of Robot Motion by Northwestern University

4.7
stars
1,011 ratings

About the Course

Do you want to know how robots work? Are you interested in robotics as a career? Are you willing to invest the effort to learn fundamental mathematical modeling techniques that are used in all subfields of robotics? If so, then the "Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control" specialization may be for you. This specialization, consisting of six short courses, is serious preparation for serious students who hope to work in the field of robotics or to undertake advanced study. It is not a sampler. In Course 1 of the specialization, Foundations of Robot Motion, you will learn fundamental material regarding robot configurations, for both serial robot mechanisms and robots with closed chains. You will learn about configuration space (C-space), degrees of freedom, C-space topology, implicit and explicit representations of configurations, and holonomic and nonholonomic constraints. You will also learn how to represent spatial velocities and forces as twists and wrenches. This material is at the core of the study of anything that moves (e.g., robots). This course follows the textbook "Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control" (Lynch and Park, Cambridge University Press 2017). You can purchase the book or use the free preprint pdf. You will build on a library of robotics software in the language of your choice (among Python, Mathematica, and MATLAB) and use the free cross-platform robot simulator V-REP, which allows you to work with state-of-the-art robots in the comfort of your own home and with zero financial investment....

Top reviews

KS

Mar 4, 2023

THe course could use more problem solving exemples and there is some information you have to figure out on your own. But overall very interesting.

WO

Dec 29, 2021

Very Engineering driven course and you better be ready for the calculations... Made for Engineers.Coming from an Electrical/Electronic background it was really intuitive. I plan on continuing...

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226 - 230 of 230 Reviews for Modern Robotics, Course 1: Foundations of Robot Motion

By Dushyant D

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Aug 5, 2025

In the course and also in the book, the formulas are not that well explained to make one able to solve the problems without searching for the topic in some other book or resources. Also in the video, the Professor skips some explanations of the formulas /derivations.

By sarthak v

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Aug 8, 2020

Clear description and detailed analysis not available in the 4th week. Making it quite cumbersome process to realize the mistakes done in answering the questions (especially last quiz of 4th week)

By Sahil G

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Aug 2, 2020

this course is good for new learners but the programming part is not detailed explained in video lectures and the questions are too tough to be solved. other then , interesting course .

By KARAN R V

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Mar 30, 2020

certain things were hard to grasp expecting more detailed explanations in an easier language

By Viktor B

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Aug 26, 2022

Dry math with very little practical examples. The videos add almost nothing to the content of the (free) textbook. Tests only verify the understanding of the math and the programming functions. I really hope that the next course will be more fun.