I mentioned in my last post that I was registered for the Coursera Robotics Specialization offered by the University of Pennsylvania. Now that several months have past I have finally completed all six courses in the Specialization.

The specialization was great overall, but did take considerable time over about 6 months. Each course was around 4-5 weeks long,  and took on average something about 10-12 hours a work per week (including all the lecture videos, quizzes and programming assignments). Some of the material was definitely a review from classes I took in college, however, some of the material was brand new to me.

The final class was a capstone project that involved pulling together concepts from the previous 5 classes to build a real physical robot. Since I love building real robots, I was quite thrilled. I was curious how the grading system would handle students building their own robots at home, and was surprised by the rather clever system Coursera uses. Each student submits a video of their robot doing whatever the assignment requires, and then this video is graded by at least three other students in the class who have also submitted a video for review. Below I’ll are the videos I submitted for grades in the capstone class:

This video was used to demonstrate that I built my robot properly, including wiring, soldering, power supplies, motor controller, etc.

This video demonstrates that I had properly calibrated and configured the robot’s front facing camera, and written a controller that allow the robot to follow an April Tag.

This video demonstrates (using a simulator) that I had properly written an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for State Estimation. (The outline robot represents the estimated state and the blue robot represents the actual state).

This was the final video for the final week of the capstone class. In this video we see that the robot plans a path from its initial position to a goal position, maneuvers through a field that includes obstacles and is able to do so because it has an accurate estimate of its state (position) even when it cannot see the April Tags (which are used for localization).

The certificates I earned for the specialization and individual classes can be seen here.