Comment by GeorgeTirebiter
5 days ago
Great, you know what you want to make. Go ahead, and do it. Look at projects previous folks have done, see how then can be adapted for your need. If you are interested in getting this One Amazing Thing working, great! You have the motivation and cranking through what you'll need to lean to succeed will be possible.
IF, on the other hand, you want to make 1e6 of these things ("tech giants seems to capture most of the conversation")-- that a completely different story. You're going to need a skilled team, ideally one that has been to a rodeo before. I can't help you there.
But if you're building one, for fun --- Just DO It. Ask friendly robotics club members when you get stuck. IF your problem is particularly and singularly unique, then whatever domain that entails, you will need to master; that's your Secret Sauce.
Ivan Sutherland, who was Thesis Advisor to CMU's first Robotics Institute PhD said something to the effect that after 4 years of a Robotics PhD program, you end up with the ability to solder and attach connectors with a high degree of confidence.
A True Roboticists requires deep knowledge in mathematics, software engineering, mechanical engineering, manufacturing small lots, reliability engineering, materials engineering, data collection & graphical evaluation methodologies..... What one might call a Systems Engineer's handbag. It also helps to be inspired by the wonders of nature that biology affords us.
The details? eh, they change. Whether you used some hot cpu, some hot language, some hot OS --- Marc Raibert's hopping & jumping robots used C and BSD4.3 Unix, with the kernel locks cleaned up (reduced) so a 1 kHz kernel interrupt stream could be supported on a 1 MIPS machine (Vax 780). Timesharing was never stopped, but the kernel did get quite a large percentage of CPU cycles.
I'll repeat: Just do it. Start. Move forward. The project will teach you the questions you must ask.
I knew Dean Sutherland at CMU, nice guy. And dad was right. Turns out an advanced grad-student software group had brought me in (back in 2004) because their grad students couldn't build reliable software for the real world, and their military "research partners" were getting rather p.o.'d. But I'm a non-degreed Mechatronics Systems Engineer, in the truest sense of the word. I'm old enough to predate software engineering programs. I learned robotics and automation because I was curious, it fueled my ADD, and I kept at it... in the beginning I used plug-in cards for the IBM PC, but I knew basic electronics as a hobby (ham radio, telephonics, heathkit, etc.) and I devoured books. Anything I could get my hands on. Especially Byte magazine and Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar columns. So get copies of Forest Mims III stuff, and get an arduino or raspberry pi (you can even get/run Codesys on a pi, to learn PLC stuff) and get magazine issues/books from Make: and watch lots of youtube from ElectroBoom and AvE and get your hands dirty. Remember, you can be skilled at robotics without building Optimus. Currently I'm building and programming high speed mail handling equipment. Not sexy, but it pays the bills and fuels my dopamine. It's all servomotors and sensors and decision logic. And challenging too, paper's moving at 1/8" per millisecond at mid-speeds, you need to be an efficient coder and pre-optimizing your logic, and it's all state machines, all the way down. Good luck. I make bank, but I'm driven in a thousand directions and I push and I try and while I may be wrong 70% of the time, that would get me into the allstar game if it was baseball! Never give up, and never surrender! LOL