Totally free, don't need to buy anything just a computer.
I've been designing electrical hardware for robots for the last 4 years for a big corporation and I can tell you, the fun and money is in the software but having another skill is awesome. Robotics is a place where multiple fields converge and if you find a good team they will help you to grow.
Embedded is the adjacent field after you complete the course. Maybe something like zephyr project.
If you want to get you feet wet with mechanical. Buy a A1 mini and play with onshape (www.onshape.com) to design your first pieces, supports for the motors or the board, try create you own gripper.
As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully. Start with the RP2040 or the RP2350, they are cheap and well documented. This skill will evolve hand by hand with the embedded coding. Start small. Learn about H-bridge and brushed motors before doing the jump to the bigboys and FOC control with brushless. Get a cheap soldering iron. If you can, a clone of the JBC C245 tips. Is the most versatile and you can find stuff in alie xpress for 45 or 50$ and would be similar to the tools you will find in the field without breaking the bank.
Search for ROS meetups. I could point you to some depending where in the world you are.
And above all, it will be a long journey. Don't dispear, do at your own time but don't forget the objective.
I'm in the field and I disagree with the initial direction of this post. You aren't going to 'learn robotics' in a meaningful manner by checking the boxes in a online ROS2 course.
Robotics is a compound discipline which pairs mechanical and electrical engineering knowledge with mathematics and software development. In order to get meaningful practice in all of these areas, I would recommend re-implementing a robot vacuum from 'scratch'.
The actual vacuum part is non-essential, as you're really trying to implement the famous 'turtle' robot and experience all the design steps/compromises/challenges first hand. As a goal, aim for autonomous navigation around your home that works equivalently to a cheap 'throwaway' robo-vac.
Keep in mind you are surrounded by robotics. Most passenger vehicles, consumer drones, micro-mobility devices and modern construction equipment are 'robots in varying degrees of disguise'. Practical knowledge regarding any of these systems transfers well if you know where to apply it.
I did a very basic version of this and it was a lot of fun. I bought a chassis online with tank treads that each had a motor. I used an Arduino to send the signal to each tread to turn and a distance sensor so it knew when it was arriving at an object. If it sensed that something was in front of it, it just turned 90 degrees and kept going.
Super simple but it felt like a big accomplishment to get that far.
Where would you recommend someone to start from a more data-sciencey background, algorithms like VSLAM look interesting to mess around with but building a whole robot just to do so seems daunting.
> And above all, it will be a long journey. Don't dispear, do at your own time but don't forget the objective.
My biggest issue with robotics is that I don't see the point in any objective.
Building a cool robot feels like it's just a toy to me, and I don't know how to get around that feeling. I studied mechatronics at uni and spent a long time learning on my own in addition.
Robotics for business is almost a cliff, very hard to get into and make something that works reliably at a reasonable cost, from a solo developer point of view
>very hard to get into and make something that works reliably at a reasonable cost, from a solo developer point of view
I mean yes, otherwise they'd be even more robotic stuff wandering about
In products they have the trade off triangle where you can pick things like fast-cheap-good, pick any two.
In robots it's cheap-reliable-featureful pick any one.
The problem with the term 'cool' is it sets no boundaries. Those constraints limit your costs and scope. That's the hard part for most people when they think about cool.
And reliable is more of a time factor (+effort). QA on products takes a massive amount of time and effort to figure out what is not reliable.
> As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully.
I enjoyed reading "Exploring Beaglebone" by Derek Molloy a few years ago, because the book has sections "how to destroy your beaglebone" and "how to interface with electronics". The website seems broken. The book's ISBN is 978-1-118-93512-5. Some of the recommendations there (voltage clamping circuit on the 1.8 V analog inputs) can save your board.
Microcontrollers and PLC are historically different fields that have some overlap as the fields converge somewhat. PLC come from relay logic and so learning Ladder Logic and playing with a cheaper Automation Direct PLC might be good if you're looking to do control systems like industrial machines and those robotics. RPi series micros are good to learn embedded electronics, servo controls and Realtime OS. Computer Engineering and Control System Engineering are treated differently even in the California State Engineering License Exams, so they tend to be different paths but the skills have some overlap. My degree was in computer engineering and didn't cover any PLC, but I contract and PLC comes up a lot in one-off things that need to be reliable.
Yeah. As some has said already PLC are more oriented to robotic arms in factories etc, where space is not a premium. Robots like anymal from anybotics, spot from boston dynamics or the unidog from unitree to name a few don't use PLC at all due to lack of space. Also energy efficiency, mcu at most will push less than a watt to move something complex, a motor control for the FOC, I mentioned earlier.
I worked for the past 4 years in HP siteprint.The main problem was developing all to fit inside a pelican case that you could check in on a plane. The smallest PLC was almost the full internal volume of the robot. That's why I said microcontrollers, more ready available to experiment at home, faaaaaaaar more cheaper and those two, very well documented. STM32 in europe is the big player but is harder to get into, the documentation tends to be cahotic.
Mmmm true, but will not replace a good coder. The software team has been experimenting with AI. Is useful and can guide you to do a Proof of concept fast but if you want to start doing very specific custom stuff all crumbles down fast.
In the next years? Yeah I see resolving path planning without a doubt or reverse kinematics or object recognition, for example. AI will be another tool, one you have to learn to use it. But replacing a full software guy... I don't see it, to be honest. I see it more like in the novel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. The first chapters explains AI as the AI agents that are being rolling out nowdays. But they will be more like what a junior engineer is to a senior, more than replacing a full team of engineers.
All we really need for the robotics AI revolution is to deploy many tens of thousands of well built, cheap, reliable robots sold at a profit that customers get tons of utility out of, get petabytes of data back from them while complying with data privacy regs, train a model on this data on a few thousand H200s, and then deploy that model back to the robots, repeating the cycle every few weeks. The rest will be easy.
AI trivializes coding: the complexity and scope of robot software will increase.
Robotics-oriented ML trivializes current robot design problems: demand for robotics engineers increases, the projects do cooler things but the day-to-day gets less interesting.
Robotics is definitely getting more accessible! But keep in mind it’s a whole different world from traditional web or desktop software development, so don’t be surprised by the relatively steep learning curve. Keep at it though!
- Buy a small robot kit from Amazon or a local reseller. Yahboom make some good robot toy car kits. Hugging Face have the open source SO-ARM101 that plenty of companies manufacture and sell now. Expect to spend about $250 USD including a Jetson Nano for a good kit, up to $1000 USD if you want some more sensors
- If you can’t afford a real robot, play around with simulators like Isaac Sim and Mujoco
- Check out LeRobot, excellent framework for ML robotics from Hugging Face
- Learn the basics of ROS
(pubsub), even if you don’t end up using it, a lot of the industry jargon and design patterns come from ROS so it helps to understand it. Think of ROS like Ruby on Rails, it’s a heavyweight batteries-included framework with lots of opinions.
- ROS does have some nice libraries for manipulation (MoveIt) and navigation (Nav2) using more classical (non-ML) methods
- Leverage AI tools such as ChatGPT and Cursor when you get stuck, it’s a lot faster than Googling when you’re just getting started and don’t even know the right term to search for.
- (Shameless plug) Check out two tools I’m working on: mcap.dev for logging and foxglove.dev for visualization
I highly recommend starting with the SO-ARM101 and the LeRobot tutorial. They're super cheap, its insanely quick to get started, and you can even buy pre-made kits like at https://partabot.com . It's the "Hello World" of robotics now, imo.
Don't bother with a Jetson Nano, you don't need that to get started, and by the time you need that you'll know a lot already. You can just drive the robot from your laptop!
Getting to training your own VLA fine-tuned model is a super quick and easy process. You can see examples of other people completing the tutorial and uploading their training/evaluation datasets here (shameless plug for my thing): https://app.destroyrobots.com
I wouldn't bother much with ROS at first tbh. It'll bog you down, and startups are moving toward using other approaches that are more developer friendly, like Rust-based embedded.
You can go far with a robot connected to USB though!
Maybe ROS is the way to get started in robotics and for AGVs it's probably the most resourced thing one could learn.
But that is really only for AGVs. Once you get into the air, it's all Mavlink (always has been), ASVs and AUVs still run MOOS, and robotic arms are far more likely to use ABB studio than Moveit and the research is going towards LeRobot with end-to-end control, not classical methods. IoT systems are mostly Home Assistant, and well, some just use MQTT directly instead.
ROS is probably not as ubiquitous as us ROS devs would like to believe, what one should learn really depends on the field one wants to be in.
ROS is still very heavily used in industry and is growing in absolute terms, but most of the newer frameworks and research are learning towards e2e methods.
But even if you don't use ROS, it really helps to have a working knowledge of how it approaches things like pubsub, logging + replay, transforms, etc.
The idea of that game is that you build vehicles to do rescues and deal with natural disasters. While there is a career mode where you gain currency that you can spend on parts and fuel, most people who play that game play it in sandbox mode where you essentially design vehicles to do certain things, while also configuring the game to chose missions it generates. For example, you can make it so you only have to deal with land rescue missions or only fight enemy ai.
The building system is VERY in depth. While you don't have to worry about structural strength, you do have to keep things in mind like part placement, CG location, internal volume for buoyancy for ships. Then you get to propulsion, which you have to build out of components - the game has a fairly indepth internal combustion engine simulator where you build custom engines, and have to make sure they are fed with adequate fuel, air, and cooled appropriately. You can do jet engines, you can do nuclear, you can do full electric, and so on.
Then you have to build systems to do missions - for example, to transport a container you have to build a crane to be able to pick it up.
Finally, the game features a microcontroller system which is the bread and butter of doing cool things. There is a bunch of sensors that can read data (GPS, laser distance, pitch, roll, heading, radar, e.t.c), which you can route into a microcontroller, and do math either with logic blocks or Lua code, and thats how you build automation. You will get very familiar with things like PID controller tuning, trigonometry math (for things like distance sensing), state machine coding practices, and other things that are all applicable to the real world.
Start by deciding its purpose. The form will follow the purpose. If you know electrical engineering, you won't make as many mistakes as I have. If you know mechanical engineering, you won't take as long to design the components as it took me. If you're a competent programmer, you won't be as slow integrating the hardware into a cohesive whole as I am. If you've read The Design of Everyday Things, you're ahead of the curve in terms of making it accessible.
I'm not joking, but some of those Lego robotics kits can work just fine for getting your feet wet. Yes, even if they are made for kids.
When I started out, it was with microcontrollers, breadboards, sensors, actuators. And even though it was in college, I do wish I had just played around with more high-level stuff first.
The lego mindstorms kits were great for this. Nice and modular for the hardware, but still real enough to teach you lessons like sometimes identical motors don't work the same way.
Although the Mindstorms line is discontinued, nowadays there's the Lego SPIKE Prime (it's marketed more towards classrooms). Like the Mindstorms EV3, you can program it with either a visual block language or MicroPython.
All the responses, most of which I've seen are great, are very software focused. I get it, makes sense for HN. There is a whole world of hardware in this space. Learning how to design mechanisms that work, and last. Custom motors, controllers, actuators, hardware.
For that there are some great points of entry now. Places like pololu robotics, Adafruit, sparkfun, etc. are all as good as ever and are great jumping off points into building and eventually designing hardware.
Robotics is more accessible than ever. The tech is here to build almost anything you want. Dream big! We can now buy cameras for a couple dollars, microphone arrays, sensors, motors and drivers. 3D printers are everywhere, stock components also available.
Or 'manage your expectations', download ROS and build another mediocre turtle bot powered by some Nvidia Teraflop chip (if they allow you to boot their sdk), and spend a year learning "abstractions" defined by other people for other projects.
Readit News
Totally free, don't need to buy anything just a computer.
I've been designing electrical hardware for robots for the last 4 years for a big corporation and I can tell you, the fun and money is in the software but having another skill is awesome. Robotics is a place where multiple fields converge and if you find a good team they will help you to grow.
Embedded is the adjacent field after you complete the course. Maybe something like zephyr project.
If you want to get you feet wet with mechanical. Buy a A1 mini and play with onshape (www.onshape.com) to design your first pieces, supports for the motors or the board, try create you own gripper.
As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully. Start with the RP2040 or the RP2350, they are cheap and well documented. This skill will evolve hand by hand with the embedded coding. Start small. Learn about H-bridge and brushed motors before doing the jump to the bigboys and FOC control with brushless. Get a cheap soldering iron. If you can, a clone of the JBC C245 tips. Is the most versatile and you can find stuff in alie xpress for 45 or 50$ and would be similar to the tools you will find in the field without breaking the bank.
Search for ROS meetups. I could point you to some depending where in the world you are.
And above all, it will be a long journey. Don't dispear, do at your own time but don't forget the objective.
Robotics is a compound discipline which pairs mechanical and electrical engineering knowledge with mathematics and software development. In order to get meaningful practice in all of these areas, I would recommend re-implementing a robot vacuum from 'scratch'.
The actual vacuum part is non-essential, as you're really trying to implement the famous 'turtle' robot and experience all the design steps/compromises/challenges first hand. As a goal, aim for autonomous navigation around your home that works equivalently to a cheap 'throwaway' robo-vac.
Keep in mind you are surrounded by robotics. Most passenger vehicles, consumer drones, micro-mobility devices and modern construction equipment are 'robots in varying degrees of disguise'. Practical knowledge regarding any of these systems transfers well if you know where to apply it.
This is the best answer-- all other answers are saying "Run this simulation of a robot".
but a simulation is not a robot. Even a simple lego tupe robot kit shows you how fiddly and complex real world moving parts make everything.
Super simple but it felt like a big accomplishment to get that far.
Deleted Comment
My biggest issue with robotics is that I don't see the point in any objective.
Building a cool robot feels like it's just a toy to me, and I don't know how to get around that feeling. I studied mechatronics at uni and spent a long time learning on my own in addition.
Robotics for business is almost a cliff, very hard to get into and make something that works reliably at a reasonable cost, from a solo developer point of view
I mean yes, otherwise they'd be even more robotic stuff wandering about
In products they have the trade off triangle where you can pick things like fast-cheap-good, pick any two.
In robots it's cheap-reliable-featureful pick any one.
The problem with the term 'cool' is it sets no boundaries. Those constraints limit your costs and scope. That's the hard part for most people when they think about cool.
And reliable is more of a time factor (+effort). QA on products takes a massive amount of time and effort to figure out what is not reliable.
I enjoyed reading "Exploring Beaglebone" by Derek Molloy a few years ago, because the book has sections "how to destroy your beaglebone" and "how to interface with electronics". The website seems broken. The book's ISBN is 978-1-118-93512-5. Some of the recommendations there (voltage clamping circuit on the 1.8 V analog inputs) can save your board.
I worked for the past 4 years in HP siteprint.The main problem was developing all to fit inside a pelican case that you could check in on a plane. The smallest PLC was almost the full internal volume of the robot. That's why I said microcontrollers, more ready available to experiment at home, faaaaaaaar more cheaper and those two, very well documented. STM32 in europe is the big player but is harder to get into, the documentation tends to be cahotic.
This could change if there are breakthroughs in AI, which is not unlikely in the coming few years. Any thoughts on that?
In the next years? Yeah I see resolving path planning without a doubt or reverse kinematics or object recognition, for example. AI will be another tool, one you have to learn to use it. But replacing a full software guy... I don't see it, to be honest. I see it more like in the novel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. The first chapters explains AI as the AI agents that are being rolling out nowdays. But they will be more like what a junior engineer is to a senior, more than replacing a full team of engineers.
Robotics-oriented ML trivializes current robot design problems: demand for robotics engineers increases, the projects do cooler things but the day-to-day gets less interesting.
Both: this is probably just AGI right?
- Buy a small robot kit from Amazon or a local reseller. Yahboom make some good robot toy car kits. Hugging Face have the open source SO-ARM101 that plenty of companies manufacture and sell now. Expect to spend about $250 USD including a Jetson Nano for a good kit, up to $1000 USD if you want some more sensors
- If you can’t afford a real robot, play around with simulators like Isaac Sim and Mujoco
- Check out LeRobot, excellent framework for ML robotics from Hugging Face
- Learn the basics of ROS (pubsub), even if you don’t end up using it, a lot of the industry jargon and design patterns come from ROS so it helps to understand it. Think of ROS like Ruby on Rails, it’s a heavyweight batteries-included framework with lots of opinions.
- ROS does have some nice libraries for manipulation (MoveIt) and navigation (Nav2) using more classical (non-ML) methods
- Leverage AI tools such as ChatGPT and Cursor when you get stuck, it’s a lot faster than Googling when you’re just getting started and don’t even know the right term to search for.
- (Shameless plug) Check out two tools I’m working on: mcap.dev for logging and foxglove.dev for visualization
Don't bother with a Jetson Nano, you don't need that to get started, and by the time you need that you'll know a lot already. You can just drive the robot from your laptop!
Getting to training your own VLA fine-tuned model is a super quick and easy process. You can see examples of other people completing the tutorial and uploading their training/evaluation datasets here (shameless plug for my thing): https://app.destroyrobots.com
I wouldn't bother much with ROS at first tbh. It'll bog you down, and startups are moving toward using other approaches that are more developer friendly, like Rust-based embedded.
You can go far with a robot connected to USB though!
But that is really only for AGVs. Once you get into the air, it's all Mavlink (always has been), ASVs and AUVs still run MOOS, and robotic arms are far more likely to use ABB studio than Moveit and the research is going towards LeRobot with end-to-end control, not classical methods. IoT systems are mostly Home Assistant, and well, some just use MQTT directly instead.
ROS is probably not as ubiquitous as us ROS devs would like to believe, what one should learn really depends on the field one wants to be in.
ROS is still very heavily used in industry and is growing in absolute terms, but most of the newer frameworks and research are learning towards e2e methods.
But even if you don't use ROS, it really helps to have a working knowledge of how it approaches things like pubsub, logging + replay, transforms, etc.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/573090/Stormworks_Build_a...
The idea of that game is that you build vehicles to do rescues and deal with natural disasters. While there is a career mode where you gain currency that you can spend on parts and fuel, most people who play that game play it in sandbox mode where you essentially design vehicles to do certain things, while also configuring the game to chose missions it generates. For example, you can make it so you only have to deal with land rescue missions or only fight enemy ai.
The building system is VERY in depth. While you don't have to worry about structural strength, you do have to keep things in mind like part placement, CG location, internal volume for buoyancy for ships. Then you get to propulsion, which you have to build out of components - the game has a fairly indepth internal combustion engine simulator where you build custom engines, and have to make sure they are fed with adequate fuel, air, and cooled appropriately. You can do jet engines, you can do nuclear, you can do full electric, and so on.
Then you have to build systems to do missions - for example, to transport a container you have to build a crane to be able to pick it up.
Finally, the game features a microcontroller system which is the bread and butter of doing cool things. There is a bunch of sensors that can read data (GPS, laser distance, pitch, roll, heading, radar, e.t.c), which you can route into a microcontroller, and do math either with logic blocks or Lua code, and thats how you build automation. You will get very familiar with things like PID controller tuning, trigonometry math (for things like distance sensing), state machine coding practices, and other things that are all applicable to the real world.
For starter, I always recommend a RC car with an Arduino (or cheaper equivalents).
Following can be had for less than <$100
- SG90 servo motor - 28BYJ-48 stepper motor - ULN2003 driver board - UNO R3 Controller Board (Elegoo) - RC car chasis/3D printed chasis
Hack around, add sensors, cameras etc. Next would be to build a robotic arm.
When I started out, it was with microcontrollers, breadboards, sensors, actuators. And even though it was in college, I do wish I had just played around with more high-level stuff first.
For that there are some great points of entry now. Places like pololu robotics, Adafruit, sparkfun, etc. are all as good as ever and are great jumping off points into building and eventually designing hardware.
Or 'manage your expectations', download ROS and build another mediocre turtle bot powered by some Nvidia Teraflop chip (if they allow you to boot their sdk), and spend a year learning "abstractions" defined by other people for other projects.