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 va…
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.
1) Get a 3D printer (or access to one). Or visit your local art supply store (for structural basswood) and hardware store (for nuts and bolts). 2) Get an electronics starter kit. (Adafruit or SparkFun are good places to start looking.) 3) Buy/borrow the book "Practical Electronics for Inventors". You don't need to read it cover to cover, but it's very useful. (Realistically, though, an LLM is probably good enough to…
I'm reading this and kind of stuck on the 4th. I have a printer though not much of 3D designer. How do one get 3D models for parts that is suitable with SparkFun electronics?
Do this course https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2 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…
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 va…
>You aren't going to 'learn robotics' in a meaningful manner by checking the boxes in a online ROS2 course.
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.
1) Get a 3D printer (or access to one). Or visit your local art supply store (for structural basswood) and hardware store (for nuts and bolts). 2) Get an electronics starter kit. (Adafruit or SparkFun are good places to start looking.) 3) Buy/borrow the book "Practical Electronics for Inventors". You don't need to read it cover to cover, but it's very useful. (Realistically, though, an LLM is probably good enough to…
I'm reading this and kind of stuck on the 4th. I have a printer though not much of 3D designer. How do one get 3D models for parts that is suitable with SparkFun electronics?
For electronics, all you really need to get started is an Arduino, 3 hobby servos, and a breadboard and wires. The first robot I sold was basically just that. And the physical parts were Lego-Technic compatible laser-cut (later 3D printed) beams. (https://bitbeam.org/, https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11747)
Start making your own "lego" then go from there. This idea can get you pretty far --> https://bitbeam.cc/en/
This feels like the "How to Draw an Owl" meme all over again. Just create a self navigating robot from scratch...
It's similar, but the advice should be good for a software professional. It's an actionable, well-documented goal which takes you through the basics you're likely to care about. If any step needs some extra explanations, the choice of project guarantees you can find hundreds of good resources for that step in particular. With that basic background, next steps will be easier to find and understand.
There was no advice provided other than to "look it up". That's not particularly helpful for someone new to the field and overwhelmed by the amount of resources and approaches. If you are aware of "documentation" it would be more useful to provide links to such resources for someone just getting started.
A solid resource for me getting started was the textbook Probabilistic Robotics. It may not be state of the art but I feel it is a great resource on the topic -
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 va…
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.
In that case it doesn't sound like you want to learn robotics - you want to learn VSLAM.
It's like saying how do I learn car manufacturing but really I just want to try to make rubber tyres.
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…
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
In all honesty I’d try and model a 2d 3-link arm in software with forward and inverse kinematics. Then I’d model the inertia of the bars, and model DC motors to apply a torque to the bar interconnects. I’d then model PID controllers for each motor to smoothly move the arm. I’d then move to 3D. Once the physics is modelled you’ll find speccing the motors, solidworks, motor drivers, and MCUs relatively straightforward…
Snoozefest for anyone looking to get hands-on. Arduino kits can be had for $50 and then 50 lines of c++ will have basic forward kinematics on a ~10 inch arm you can play with in the real world.
Really? I’d have thought 50 lines of arduino would’ve been a snooze fest for hackernews