Now is an excellent time to work in robotics. Every major car company will be transitioning their car offerings to semi-robotic systems. Every major Army, navy, or air force will be adopting automated systems in an increasing degree. Decent wages for bluecollar work means decent prices for automated systems. The buildout of American manufacturing means automation is key. Finally, space exploration booms mean robots (not necessarily fully autonomous, but largely automated systems) are in increasing demand for aerospace too. Is spaceX building robots? Yes they are!
I would recommend the masters for the coursework and practical background. A degree from CMU will get you through the pedigree filter at most jobs. I've hired plenty of CMU masters students and have always been happy with them.
Robotics itself does have many of the job archetypes you'd expect from a hardware/software heavy industry.
Regardless of the path, specialization is key. You might be (woefully incompletely) categorized as:
- systems folks (middleware, CUDA, distributed systems, hard C, C++, ROS-like, etc). Even things like CI/CD knowledge as applied to robotics can get you a long way.
- Vision (CNN/DL, but do not stop there. You should also have basic knowledge of tracking, homographies, and the old school CV stuff to make it work well in a system (as opposed to just scoring high on training data))
- Controls (PID and the bigger cousins - this is not my area)
- Tracking (EKF and the bigger cousins - in particular MH-EKF and please don't skimp on batch filters we have enough CPU to do that nowadays)
- Mapping & Prediction (often this is done so poorly that a person who has lots of practice building 2d/3d and semantic maps is a godsend, especially incorporating uncertainty - critically predicting future maps (+5-30s) is an amazing thing to have)
- Planning (99% of planning nowadays is trajectory planning which is kind of "just" figuring out from a map and destination what the signal is over time that goes to the control subsystem. But there's also route planning- where should we go an in what order, activity planning (what are good destinations and in what order), or even multi-agent planning (how do I get a bunch of agents to not just collide when trying to do individual activities))
- Proprioception (Sometimes just called Estimation) you'll want to be an expert in IMUs, Gyros, the EKF filter, using vision signals, magnetic signals, GPS, etc
- Exterioception (more general than Tracking) options are LIDAR, Radar, Bog-Standard Dispartiy, or any other sensor you can think of.
- Simulation - rapidly becoming extremely important or foundational to a good robotics program, especially one built on learning. This often has a lot of overlap with games programming so this can attract a certain type.
Roughly speaking, if you decide you like one of Sim, Controls, Planning (what kind?), Proprioception, Exterioception/mapping, Tracking, or Systems, you should tailor your coursework and projects to match.
Oh and I should mention - once you pick one of these, they are often very different when you are working on wheeled vehicles vs legged ones vs aircraft vs spacecraft vs plain-old-arms/ manipulators. But the skills are transferable so learn strong fundamentals.
Anti-recommendations:
- LLMs. I have heard they are going to be helpful, but are just hype so far. Skip for robotics AFAICT
- UI/UX. Everyone says they are going to invent the easiest-to-use automated system, just as soon as it "works". Spoiler alert, just like Akins laws of spacecraft design, if your system involves building a robot to build some other product, you are defacto a robotics company and will spend all your time making the robot work.
There are very few "Generalist" robotics positions -- you'll be competing with PhDs who are specialists but picked up enough experience doing their PhD to have generalist level skills. You want to be on a specific team doing a specific thing deeply. It's also the most fun to be on a specialized team!
Remember, there are two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding. So Simulation, Proprioception, Exterioception, Mapping, Prediction, esp Vision (nowadays) are hugely important to the success of a program. As a planning guy, the rest is "easy".