Unable to run pykalma example code that is reading MAT file with scipy - scipy

Question

Below is the line of the code that pykalman example is using to load the matlab file robot.mat. However, it is throwing an error with message ValueError: Unknown mat file type, version 100, 110.
I am new to reading matlab files in Python. Can anyone help me understand exactly what version it is expecting and how to get around the issue?
data = io.loadmat(join(module_path, 'data', 'robot.mat'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda2\lib\site-
packages\IPython\core\interactiveshell.py", line 2881, in run_code
exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns)
File "<ipython-input-4-0439d709929f>", line 1, in <module>
data = load_robot()
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda2\lib\site-packages\pykalman\datasets\base.py",
line 45, in load_robot
data = io.loadmat(join(module_path, 'data', 'robot.mat'))
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda2\lib\site-packages\scipy\io\matlab\mio.py",
line 135, in loadmat
MR = mat_reader_factory(file_name, appendmat, **kwargs)
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda2\lib\site-packages\scipy\io\matlab\mio.py",
line 59, in mat_reader_factory
mjv, mnv = get_matfile_version(byte_stream)
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda2\lib\site-
packages\scipy\io\matlab\miobase.py",
line 241, in get_matfile_version
raise ValueError('Unknown mat file type, version %s, %s' % ret)
ValueError: Unknown mat file type, version 100, 110

Answer 1

I'm guessing here (and adding one more idea to hpaulj's good overview):
First i checked the file manually and opening in an editor reads as:
MATLAB 5.0 MAT-file, Platform: MACI64, Created on: Tue Jun 26 00:59:04 2012
...
Therefore there should be no problem in regards to scipy (if the mat-file is actually following this "header").
Now it seems there are some open issues with that project with the most relevant beeing:
Unable to load robot.mat #59
(Don't be surprised too much with the different eror-values as i would expect possibly indeterministic stuff like that when bad IO is beeing done)
and: pykalman/datasets/ not copied when pykalman is installed with pip #66
So it seems this dataset does not come with pip-install automatically, which looks like your problem and should be easily handled (manually obtaining the data!). It is also compatible with hpaulj's wondering about that strange error (one could argue if there is no better error-handling possible).