EC ENGR 183DA
Design of Robotic Systems I
Description: Lecture, four hours; laboratory, two hours; outside study, six hours. Requisite: course 102. Recommended: courses 141, 142. Course 183DA is requisite to 183DB. Limited to senior Electrical Engineering majors. Topics in robotic design include integrated electromechanical design, design for manufacturing (DFM), design software, and design automation. Topics in robotic manufacturing include materials, sensors and actuators, programming, and rapid prototyping. Topics in control include manipulation, motion and path planning, learning and adaptation, and human-robot interaction. Additional topics may include distributed and multi-robot systems, bio-inspired robotics, project management, and societal implications. Open-ended projects vary annually. Student teams create and analyze robotic systems for various applications. Oral and written presentation of project results. In Progress grading (credit to be given only on completion of course 183DB).
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2022 - DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! I want robotics to be my entire career. I love it so much and have been excited to take this capstone class since my freshman year at UCLA. Unfortunately, it has been one of the most unfulfilling and disappointing experiences I’ve ever had, despite me trying to make the best of it at every turn. I’m expecting to get an A or A- in this class so I’m not upset about a grade or something. I’m upset because this class is run by a group of professors who have no business at all running it (not the TAs, they actually gave constructive feedback and really tried their best to help). The professors’ feeble attempt at creating any sort of structure completely fell flat– and that is giving them the benefit of the doubt assuming they even tried at all (which I honestly don’t think they did.) At every possible juncture, we felt like an afterthought to these clowns. And yes, I genuinely mean clowns. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some things they did: 1) Posted the turn-in link for assignments at 1AM when they were due noon the next day, after assigning those same assignments less than 48 hours beforehand. 2) Made assignments due BEFORE the class time that they alloted to WORK ON THOSE ASSIGNMENTS. 3) Assigned labs with insanely unreasonable timelines and no instruction besides incredibly low-quality recorded lectures from years ago that cover theory without any examples remotely close to the material of the labs. 4) Canceled class on multiple occasions WITHOUT TELLING STUDENTS, waiting for us to arrive at the room (some who commuted over 30 minutes to get there) to tell us “oh yeah we have nothing planned. You can go home.” 5) Tried to gaslight our entire class into believing there was an assignment and presentation that had been discussed and was due in under 24 hours. Then after we busted our asses to complete that assignment overnight (which required the coordination of 9 people with mismatched, busy schedules), we were told in class that “by make the Gantt chart, they meant we had to make the chart AND AND ENTIRE PRESENTATION that we would be presenting in ONE HOUR.” 6) Halfway through the class decided to combine the ME and ECE canvas sites, erasing all ECE assignments, discussion forums, and announcements. Yep, there goes the spec I needed to work on the lab. Was it reposted? No. My favorite part about this one is that these fools didn’t even realize everything was erased for about 24 hours until I emailed them about it. I have never seen such disrespect by professors and complete disregard for their students’ time. This class is a joint course between mechanical and electrical engineers. The problem is the ratio of ECE to ME students is 3:6 and the ECE to ME workload for the labs is about 10:1, and that is generous. The ME’s agree completely too; we had to formulate an entire kinematics model mathematically with virtually no description of the system, code a working model with graphing and animations in python, set up a Webots simulation and write code for that so it could interface with the python code, and then build the differential drive robot out of wood and completely design, wire, and solder the entire thing together. The mechanical engineers built a wooden skeleton of the woodbot out of balsa wood (with no electronics), then broke it with weights. That’s literally it. They finished in class. We stayed up until 5AM sometimes working on our part, only to find out the components they gave us were bad or the code wasn’t like the spec said it was. Oh yeah, and they wanted all that from 3 students in 4 weeks while giving us a ton of other bullshit on the “project track.” Let’s talk about the project track. I don’t think I have ever wasted that amount of time in a class on anything more asinine as the “design process” they put us through. I’m very familiar with the formal design process and even did more research into it for this class. It involves coming up with a problem and justifying design decisions to come up with some solution. It does NOT involve 3 weeks of brainstorming 9 different technologies and giving 30 MINUTE PRESENTATION ON THEM WEEKLY to figure out a project idea. It was around the second week of these brain-melting presentations that I began developing a genuine resentment for this class. Amazingly enough, exactly zero of the ideas we generated during this three-week shitfest contributed in any way to our final project idea– mostly because every idea we came up with, the professors shit on immediately. I’m all for telling students to be realistic, but they did it in the most demoralizing way possible. On that note, let me say I actually respect Mehta as a researcher and engineer for his work. That said, he is hands down one of the lowest-quality professors I have ever come across in my entire life. Ankur Mehta is the ringleader of the absolute circus that is this course. I've never wanted to give a Bruinwalk review with a negative number of stars until now. My favorite review of this class said, “Do not expect any sympathy from this shell of a man.” I understand what they meant. He did not say a single positive word to me the entire course. Apparently we did nothing right; nobody did. Only negative feedback from him, half of which contradicts the feedback he would give the next day. I would review Jacob Rosen as well, but he said about 20 audible words to the class over the course of 10 weeks. He actually seems like a nice guy, so I don’t really have anything bad to say about him. I don’t know if this is because I’m an ECE, but it felt like he wasn’t even an instructor for this class. It felt more like Rosen sat there and watched Mehta’s cesspool of woodbot hell unfold in front of him. But even these two seem half competent next to the “sharks” they brought in for our mock investor pitch. Not only did we get grilled on one aspect of our design for the majority of the 8 minutes of question time, but this aspect was a SOLVED PROBLEM. The expert on IR sensors was basically trying to flex on undergraduate students that they knew more about IR sensors. What a sad existence. Thank you for wasting all the work we put into preparing backup slides and answers to meaningful questions. And better yet, the group after us wanted to use IR sensors across 10x to 100x the distance and received no questions about them. We weren’t asked a single investment or business style question– they treated it like a design review which was NOT what we were told to expect. Again, a COLOSSAL waste of everybody’s time. And that’s really what the first quarter of this class was: busy work and wasted time. I’m going into the second quarter as optimistically as possible to try to salvage the senior capstone I was so excited about for years. I didn’t think I would genuinely start crying in a lab session from the pressure of this class that was supposed to be a good time. But I guess I was wrong. Mehta, you single-handedly ruined the academic portion of my last two quarters at UCLA. Please never teach human beings again.
Winter 2022 - DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! I want robotics to be my entire career. I love it so much and have been excited to take this capstone class since my freshman year at UCLA. Unfortunately, it has been one of the most unfulfilling and disappointing experiences I’ve ever had, despite me trying to make the best of it at every turn. I’m expecting to get an A or A- in this class so I’m not upset about a grade or something. I’m upset because this class is run by a group of professors who have no business at all running it (not the TAs, they actually gave constructive feedback and really tried their best to help). The professors’ feeble attempt at creating any sort of structure completely fell flat– and that is giving them the benefit of the doubt assuming they even tried at all (which I honestly don’t think they did.) At every possible juncture, we felt like an afterthought to these clowns. And yes, I genuinely mean clowns. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some things they did: 1) Posted the turn-in link for assignments at 1AM when they were due noon the next day, after assigning those same assignments less than 48 hours beforehand. 2) Made assignments due BEFORE the class time that they alloted to WORK ON THOSE ASSIGNMENTS. 3) Assigned labs with insanely unreasonable timelines and no instruction besides incredibly low-quality recorded lectures from years ago that cover theory without any examples remotely close to the material of the labs. 4) Canceled class on multiple occasions WITHOUT TELLING STUDENTS, waiting for us to arrive at the room (some who commuted over 30 minutes to get there) to tell us “oh yeah we have nothing planned. You can go home.” 5) Tried to gaslight our entire class into believing there was an assignment and presentation that had been discussed and was due in under 24 hours. Then after we busted our asses to complete that assignment overnight (which required the coordination of 9 people with mismatched, busy schedules), we were told in class that “by make the Gantt chart, they meant we had to make the chart AND AND ENTIRE PRESENTATION that we would be presenting in ONE HOUR.” 6) Halfway through the class decided to combine the ME and ECE canvas sites, erasing all ECE assignments, discussion forums, and announcements. Yep, there goes the spec I needed to work on the lab. Was it reposted? No. My favorite part about this one is that these fools didn’t even realize everything was erased for about 24 hours until I emailed them about it. I have never seen such disrespect by professors and complete disregard for their students’ time. This class is a joint course between mechanical and electrical engineers. The problem is the ratio of ECE to ME students is 3:6 and the ECE to ME workload for the labs is about 10:1, and that is generous. The ME’s agree completely too; we had to formulate an entire kinematics model mathematically with virtually no description of the system, code a working model with graphing and animations in python, set up a Webots simulation and write code for that so it could interface with the python code, and then build the differential drive robot out of wood and completely design, wire, and solder the entire thing together. The mechanical engineers built a wooden skeleton of the woodbot out of balsa wood (with no electronics), then broke it with weights. That’s literally it. They finished in class. We stayed up until 5AM sometimes working on our part, only to find out the components they gave us were bad or the code wasn’t like the spec said it was. Oh yeah, and they wanted all that from 3 students in 4 weeks while giving us a ton of other bullshit on the “project track.” Let’s talk about the project track. I don’t think I have ever wasted that amount of time in a class on anything more asinine as the “design process” they put us through. I’m very familiar with the formal design process and even did more research into it for this class. It involves coming up with a problem and justifying design decisions to come up with some solution. It does NOT involve 3 weeks of brainstorming 9 different technologies and giving 30 MINUTE PRESENTATION ON THEM WEEKLY to figure out a project idea. It was around the second week of these brain-melting presentations that I began developing a genuine resentment for this class. Amazingly enough, exactly zero of the ideas we generated during this three-week shitfest contributed in any way to our final project idea– mostly because every idea we came up with, the professors shit on immediately. I’m all for telling students to be realistic, but they did it in the most demoralizing way possible. On that note, let me say I actually respect Mehta as a researcher and engineer for his work. That said, he is hands down one of the lowest-quality professors I have ever come across in my entire life. Ankur Mehta is the ringleader of the absolute circus that is this course. I've never wanted to give a Bruinwalk review with a negative number of stars until now. My favorite review of this class said, “Do not expect any sympathy from this shell of a man.” I understand what they meant. He did not say a single positive word to me the entire course. Apparently we did nothing right; nobody did. Only negative feedback from him, half of which contradicts the feedback he would give the next day. I would review Jacob Rosen as well, but he said about 20 audible words to the class over the course of 10 weeks. He actually seems like a nice guy, so I don’t really have anything bad to say about him. I don’t know if this is because I’m an ECE, but it felt like he wasn’t even an instructor for this class. It felt more like Rosen sat there and watched Mehta’s cesspool of woodbot hell unfold in front of him. But even these two seem half competent next to the “sharks” they brought in for our mock investor pitch. Not only did we get grilled on one aspect of our design for the majority of the 8 minutes of question time, but this aspect was a SOLVED PROBLEM. The expert on IR sensors was basically trying to flex on undergraduate students that they knew more about IR sensors. What a sad existence. Thank you for wasting all the work we put into preparing backup slides and answers to meaningful questions. And better yet, the group after us wanted to use IR sensors across 10x to 100x the distance and received no questions about them. We weren’t asked a single investment or business style question– they treated it like a design review which was NOT what we were told to expect. Again, a COLOSSAL waste of everybody’s time. And that’s really what the first quarter of this class was: busy work and wasted time. I’m going into the second quarter as optimistically as possible to try to salvage the senior capstone I was so excited about for years. I didn’t think I would genuinely start crying in a lab session from the pressure of this class that was supposed to be a good time. But I guess I was wrong. Mehta, you single-handedly ruined the academic portion of my last two quarters at UCLA. Please never teach human beings again.
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