CS 4501

Review for CS 4501 - Autonomous Vehicles (AKA F1/Tenth)

This was overall a fun, pretty low stress class. Class lectures were pretty boring, I don't feel like I really learned anything valuable from them. Halfway through the semester, half of the class was no longer coming. The professor sometimes talked about real world applications of how autonomous cars work which was somewhat interesting, but not super engaging.

Grading was based on 5 assignments, slowly building up to creating a fully autonomous race car. The cars are already all pre-built, so you don't need to worry about that. Additionally, you're given most of the skeleton code, and really just have to fill out a few functions or files here and there. All coding is just in python, so really it's not too bad. You'll have "race days" where everyone gets to put their car on the track to see how fast they can go compared to each other. The track & F1/Tenth room is on second floor in Rice, all students have access to that room w/ their ID.

You're put in a group of 4-5 students on a team for the semester, each team is given one car and one computer to connect to the car. A little annoying that you have to use the computer whenever you want to work on the car, which can slow down work especially when you're in a group of 5.

Lots of time just spent debugging, as the actual code-writing isn't that hard. You use ROS which can be really powerful, but confusing to get a hold of. However, seeing your car complete it's first lap around the track with no human controlling makes it all worth it

This is a pretty cool class if you're interested in autonomous driving. By the end of this course, you will have programmed a small car to drive around a track, avoid obstacles, and race other cars all by itself. The lectures themselves are not super interesting and the professor is not super engaging, and I stopped going to lectures about halfway through the semester. All the work in this class is done with a group - which can be good or bad depending on what your group is like. The time you spend is also kinda erratic as you will go 2 weeks without doing anything and then have to spend many hours straight working on your car in the days leading up to each demo. I learned a bit of ROS but the programming is mostly just simple python. It was nice to have a class that I didn't have to think about most weeks and barely had to attend lectures. The grading is pretty easy too, there are tons of free points on every assignment so it's almost impossible to get a bad grade. Overall, it was a pretty unique class and you will almost definitely get an A if you do the work.

I learned quite a bit of interesting stuff in this class. The lectures go into a lot of depth that's pretty hard to understand, so a lot of times I ended up zoning out, but I came away with the basic principles of each topic and even that was quite helpful.

My biggest complaint with this class is that it's all groupwork-based, which is never my favorite type of work. I had a hard time lining up my schedule with the rest of my teammates and so I wasn't able to contribute as much as I would have liked.

An interesting topic that is ruined by a complete lack of care from the Professor. The professor has a passion for autonomous driving and has the knowledge but puts very little effort into teaching the class. You randomly get sent classes to watch on YouTube on no particular schedule and watch someone read off slides. This year we have not gotten to a significant amount of the material listed on the syllabus - which is not an actual syllabus but an outdated website from past semesters (like a lot of other material in this course). It's now one week before the end of the semester and we have submitted a single assignment in March which has still not been graded. Might as well just watch YouTube!

This is one of the rare cases in the CS department that the topic of the class is very interesting but somehow the professor managed to make it one of the most boring and useless classes you have taken. Professor Behl is definitely knowledgeable and passionate about the work he's doing but he failed to incorporate his passion into lectures. Most of the lectures were just him reading slides and showing us how the math should look like. The pace of lectures is slow and the material is pretty dry.
In addition to boring lectures, the planning of the class is also extremely bad as the first half of the semester is just following online tutorials for ROS. Professor Behl could have just assign a simple assignment for students to learn ROS online within a week, but he chose to spend about five weeks just showing students what is online. In the second half the semester, we began to teach techniques for PID control. mapping etc. But we do not have enough time to put these concepts into the actual algorithm and he canceled several classes without telling us beforehand. By the end we only have about three weeks to actually work the algorithm for racing the car during the final-exam period. The poor planing of the class would disappoint students who come to the class with high expectation of designing a cool F1/10 racing car.
Even though he mentioned that Machine Learning might be covered in the lecture and would be helpful for the final demo, there is little time to actually implement it into the design.. There is only one TA for the class but he is very helpful (more helpful than lecturer)