Professor
Paulo Tabuada
1 of 3
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2024 - I was already into the material before, and this class furthered my interests. He's a very sharp man and an excellent lecturer, so I would highly suggest attending lecture. The nature of the class is that it's easy to get lost in the details of a design technique, but he does this thing about twice a quarter where he takes a step back and just designs an entire controller for a system from scratch during lecture, which ties everything together and let's you see the big picture. Homeworks: very reasonable, basically copies of the discussion problems which he solves over zoom. Exams: Ran out of time on midterm, still did okay. Final was easier, finished with time left and no curveballs. Curve: Pre-curved class where an 81 is an A-. The project takes an enormous amount of time, took me then entire week and a half before finals week of working on it every day. Was going over ideas basically daily with others in the class, and definitely needed to discuss it with others. Start this project literally the day it is assigned, and keep your Simulink implementation very neat and organized or else you'll be very confused towards the end. Also, he will have a lecture around week 4 that explains the method you need to use for the project, but you will never touch that method (linearization of nonlinear systems) until the project is assigned. Make sure you take solid notes during that lecture (this is what saved me). In the end my buddy and I got it all working, and looking back it was a super fun project which taught me a lot of stuff that I'm using now for more controls projects.
Spring 2024 - I was already into the material before, and this class furthered my interests. He's a very sharp man and an excellent lecturer, so I would highly suggest attending lecture. The nature of the class is that it's easy to get lost in the details of a design technique, but he does this thing about twice a quarter where he takes a step back and just designs an entire controller for a system from scratch during lecture, which ties everything together and let's you see the big picture. Homeworks: very reasonable, basically copies of the discussion problems which he solves over zoom. Exams: Ran out of time on midterm, still did okay. Final was easier, finished with time left and no curveballs. Curve: Pre-curved class where an 81 is an A-. The project takes an enormous amount of time, took me then entire week and a half before finals week of working on it every day. Was going over ideas basically daily with others in the class, and definitely needed to discuss it with others. Start this project literally the day it is assigned, and keep your Simulink implementation very neat and organized or else you'll be very confused towards the end. Also, he will have a lecture around week 4 that explains the method you need to use for the project, but you will never touch that method (linearization of nonlinear systems) until the project is assigned. Make sure you take solid notes during that lecture (this is what saved me). In the end my buddy and I got it all working, and looking back it was a super fun project which taught me a lot of stuff that I'm using now for more controls projects.
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2024 - Overall one of my favorite professors. He doesn't use slides or record lectures, so if you want to do well, show up to lecture and take notes. But he explains everything very well and simplifies it. Like another review said, I also found it very helpful when he would design a controller from scratch to reinforce the material we had learned in the past couple of weeks. This class is mostly about designing controllers, and there is a somewhat straightforward process of trial and error, and tests you need to run to get it working. The midterm was fair, but harder than the final to be honest. They were both graded extremely leniently, and lots of partial credit. The project was the one downside to this class. The class is about linear systems, but your controller has to work for a non-linear system (a process he explains in ~week 4 and never visits again), but the project is assigned in week 7 or 8. I feel as though the project could have been assigned a bit earlier (around week 6) after going over the Root Locus lectures, since after that, you basically know everything to start the project. The project took an extremely long time to do, but it was also graded leniently. Homework was straight out of the textbook and he answers very similar problems to the homework every week during recorded Zoom office hours. Overall a great professor with a good sense of humor and very interesting class
Spring 2024 - Overall one of my favorite professors. He doesn't use slides or record lectures, so if you want to do well, show up to lecture and take notes. But he explains everything very well and simplifies it. Like another review said, I also found it very helpful when he would design a controller from scratch to reinforce the material we had learned in the past couple of weeks. This class is mostly about designing controllers, and there is a somewhat straightforward process of trial and error, and tests you need to run to get it working. The midterm was fair, but harder than the final to be honest. They were both graded extremely leniently, and lots of partial credit. The project was the one downside to this class. The class is about linear systems, but your controller has to work for a non-linear system (a process he explains in ~week 4 and never visits again), but the project is assigned in week 7 or 8. I feel as though the project could have been assigned a bit earlier (around week 6) after going over the Root Locus lectures, since after that, you basically know everything to start the project. The project took an extremely long time to do, but it was also graded leniently. Homework was straight out of the textbook and he answers very similar problems to the homework every week during recorded Zoom office hours. Overall a great professor with a good sense of humor and very interesting class
AD
AD
1 of 3
