Robotics Master's Curriculum

Robotics Master’s Curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania

The Robotics MSE program has been designed to provide students with a comprehensive background in robotics while also providing enough flexibility to allow students to focus their studies on particular areas within the broader field.

Students are required to take courses in at least three of the four foundational areas: Artificial Intelligence, Robot Design and Analysis, Control and Perception.

Note: Students are allowed and, in fact, encouraged to take more than three courses from the list of foundational courses. These additional courses can be counted as Technical Electives or as General Electives.

Students are required to take at least 5 courses from the list of Technical Electives. Students are allowed 2 General Elective courses which can be taken from any technical field (egs. Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical and Systems Engineering or Mechanical Engineering). Courses in other disciplines may be used as General Electives with the pre-approval (via petition) of the Robotics Program Director.

Foundational Courses (complete 1 course from 3 out of the 4 areas: 3 courses total):

Artificial Intelligence:

CIS 5190 Applied Machine Learning
CIS 5200 Machine Learning
CIS 5210 Artificial Intelligence
ESE 6500 Learning in Robotics

Robot Design and Analysis:

MEAM 5100 Design of Mechatronic Systems *Final Student Presentation Video Below
MEAM 5200 Introduction to Robotics *Final Student Presentation Video Below
MEAM 6200 Advanced Robotics

Control:

ESE 5000 Linear Systems
ESE 5050/MEAM 5130 Control Systems Design
MEAM 5170 Control & Optimization w/Applications in Robotics
ESE 6190 Model Predictive Control

Perception:

CIS 5800 Machine Perception
CIS 5810 Computer Vision & Computational Photography
CIS 6800 Adv. Topics in Machine Perception

Technical Elective Courses (must complete at least 5)

List of Technical Elective Courses

General Elective Courses (at most 2)

List of General Elective Courses

MEAM 5100 Final Presentation Videos – Teaser & Full Video (YouTube)

Teaser

Full Video

MEAM 5200 Final Presentation Videos – Teaser & Full Video (YouTube)

Teaser

Full Video

Specialization

The Robotics master’s program has been designed to provide students with a comprehensive background in robotics while also providing enough flexibility to allow students to focus their studies on particular areas within the broader field.

Please note: these specializations are not officially attached to the ROBO degree in any way, but merely suggested curricula to provide examples of how the Robotics MSE degree could be targeted towards specific topics.

Course Schedules

Course Descriptions

Master’s Thesis Option

Students may pursue research and write an MSE thesis on a suitable topic under the supervision of a GRASP faculty member (usually but not necessarily their academic advisor). The findings of the thesis should be made as a verbal presentation to the members of GRASP Lab. The thesis must be prepared and submitted following the SEAS and University of Pennsylvania requirements as outlined here.

Here are some additional resources:

Penn Engineering information regarding submitting and formatting the Master’s Thesis here.
The Penn Master’s Thesis Guide can be accessed here.

The student’s advisor and the Robotics master’s Program Director will make the final approval of the thesis. Registration for two masters thesis credits counts towards two of the technical elective requirements.

More graduate student resources are available here – https://grad.seas.upenn.edu/

QUESTIONS

Graduate Coordinator for ROBO
Office: The GRASP Treehouse in Building 250 at the Pennovation Center
robo-coord@seas.upenn.edu

Robotics Master's Curriculum