Introdução à Robótica

Even thought the course is supposed to be introductory, it seems to assumes familiarity with ROS (which is used for project development). Very little formal introduction was provided, making the initial setup rather difficult

Teaching staff were largely unavailable for help. There were no scheduled office hours, and most questions had to be posted online or saved for a single weekly session repurposed as an “office hour”. This made it difficult to get support in a efficient way

Project:

The idea of the project (robot localization and self-navigation) was interesting and cool. However,...

I chose this course as an optional subject, and although the project’s concept is genuinely interesting and relevant, I found it quite challenging for a course titled Introduction to Robotics. In my view, the project did not fully align with what would be expected from an introductory unit, especially for students without previous experience in robotics.

The project statement was not always clear regarding what was expected, which made it difficult to understand the correct direction to follow. Additionally, there were no scheduled office hours; communication was done mainly through...

I chose this course as an easier alternative while working on my master’s thesis, since it has no exam. However, as my colleagues explained in other reviews, this course had several issues, such as:

• Lack of teacher support, class planning, and funds to provide the robots necessary for project completion (only 3 robots shared among nearly 100 students);
• No proper introduction to the tools used in the project (which is quite ironic for an introductory course);
• Over-evaluation of the work developed, with weekly presentations that mostly wasted valuable time...

Probably one of the worst courses I have taken at Técnico.

I honestly don’t know where to start. The course is called Introduction to Robotics, but there’s nothing introductory about it.

The course consists of theoretical classes and laboratory classes:

• The theoretical classes explain algorithms in an overly complex way and are mostly irrelevant for such a highly practical course, especially considering that the evaluation is entirely project-based.
• The laboratory classes are essentially for presenting the work you’ve done during the week, where the teachers are supposed...

We had to do presentations every single week. The only laboratory class we had was for said presentations. We also had a class for doubts only, where the teacher wasn’t super helpful. The robots often had problems plus a lot of groups going into the lab at the same time to test their code ended up limiting the access to the robots and lead us to waste a lot of time just waiting for one to be available. The evaluation method consisted of:

• 6 presentations worth only 20
• final report of 20 pages max worth 50% (in latex with all the work and code we developed
• final oral presentation worth...

Great introductory course for CS students interested in Robotics. It's also a fun and low-workload option for those looking to take an optional course.

The grading is 100% practical. This year, we had two projects (self-localization and path planning), with weekly (relaxed) presentations during lab classes, two reports, and one final presentation covering both projects.

The theoretical classes were taught by Prof. Rita Cunha. They were sometimes a bit slow, but overall interesting, even if a bit superficial. It's easy to skip them since some topics aren't directly applied to the projects or...

This course is extremely introductory. You learn to work with ROS, but most of it is self-taught.

The projects mainly involve using existing packages to make the robot do basic tasks like localization, pathfinding, and so on.

The theory gives you just the minimum needed to complete the projects. You’ll cover things like mapping and localization algorithms, Markov Chains and MDPs (Markov Decision Processes)

But honestly, you can learn these topics better and in more depth in other Intelligent Systems courses.

Syllabus

The theory classes mostly skim over general robotics topics like 'here are some cool robots moving around' or 'this is what sensors are...', and other things you probably already know, like pathfinding algorithms. Only about 15–20% of the theory felt like new, useful content.

Projects

There are 3 mini-projects, done in groups of 2. They’re small and reasonably fun.

This year's project was basically implementing a Roomba. We had to make a robot move around, localize itself, and map the room. In each assignment, we had to write a report about the experience.

While the...