Robotics

I’m getting kind of interested in robotics and want to learn more.

How and where to get started in robotics?

It is pretty hard since it combines so many disciplines, from Software Engineering to Mechanical Engineering to Electrical Engineering — but this also makes it quite interesting.

However, for a beginner in robotics, it may seem extremely overwhelming to get started, as it just seems that there are so many things to learn. But this also applies for all disciplines that are moving fast, such as AI.

Listen to some of the advice for beginners given by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2ZK3ngNvvI&ab_channel=LexClips

It doesn’t matter how you get started, it just matters that you start somewhere.

Beginners are too focused on what to do, and not how much to do. You need to put in your 10,000 hours if you want to get good at robotics.

Things you can do put in those hours (this is what I did):

• For High School/University students:
  • Join student design teams. Find other students passionate about robots.
  • Join robotics labs and work under a professor. They will give you access to good robots and give you good guidance / mentorship.
• Generally:
  • Go through the best textbooks and lectures online (I link those everywhere on my website) to gain theoretical understanding. Get good at C++ and Python.
  • Build things from scratch to gain practical intuition. Start with simple projects like line-following robots to understand hardware-software interaction.
    • I started with Arduinos, before moving onto Raspberry Pi, and ROS on Jetson

As you experiment, you’ll find that certain activities will give you a higher ROI on your time, and you’ll naturally prioritize those activities. The important thing to remember is that these activities are different from person and person, and that you need to experiment to figure out what works for YOUp.