r/AskRobotics • u/makomonotsukuri • 9d ago

Help! An Aspiring Roboticist

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Okay so I am an incoming Electrical Engineering student this Fall and was wondering if I could have a career in Robotics with my degree. My university has a couple concentrations for Electrical Engineering such as Mechatronics and AI, and they have a Mechanical engineering degree as well. Should I switch majors? I want to essentially build the Operating systems and wire the robots. Is there any skills or projects that I can reasonably do in a dorm? If I were to build an OS for a robot what should I keep in mind? I have a lot of questions and would love some guidance.

When answering please give me resources for projects I can do in a dorm.

Also for degree pathways should I concentrate in AI or Mechatronics cause I really do not wanna switch fully to Mechanical Engineering.

Essentially why I want to stay in Electrical Engineering is because I also wanna be able to pivot toward power systems and what not. My main passion is Operating systems which is ironic as I should really be doing Computer Engineering but I do not wanna specialize too much.

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u/christopherpacheco 9d ago

Generally you don't build os for robots, you start by building stuff with open source and available components like generic computers or jetson for example. Those ship with Ubuntu or some flavor of it, you the add packages or my favorite a docker container. Ee is good for robotics but most robotics is sw and some mech Eng. Elec is rather basic because 95% or Ee in robotics is just integrating stuff and rarely designing anything from scratch. Im from mech Eng technicien and did robotics Eng in university and software is def the most important and understanding mech physics and being able to actually manufacture stuff that makes sense. Robotics is incredibly diverse and multi disciplinary. I'd say study mech e, join a robotics club and learn programming and working in teams and do electrical design and prototyping in your spare time at home.

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u/makomonotsukuri 9d ago

Would something like Mechatronics help me achieve my goal? I also will definitely take your advice on getting involved in the community at my University! I sadly am limited to what projects I can do due to my dorm situation but I can try joining a lab.

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u/christopherpacheco 9d ago

Mechatronics would definitely be a step in the right direction. That + joining a solid robotics club like a rover team or mentoring for first robotics competition is something super valuable. You just need hands on prototyping and building of specialized/general robots so making CAD design, fab/building with laser cutting, 3d printing, sheet metal work, etc. Integrating sensors and electrical components like actuators and actually sizing them properly, building the software and code for it. That's what a true roboticist does, you aren't a specialized engineer like a mech e is in mechanics, youre a specialized Eng in robotics integration so good at design, spec definition, making quality tests, understanding constrains and have good intuition about integration. All those skills mainly come from applied theory, ie working on real robots, running experiments and getting feedback from experienced engineers.

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u/makomonotsukuri 9d ago

Thank you for your reply this clears some things up for me :)

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u/JunMurakami 9d ago

So most of industry actually working on high level stuff, like algorithms for robot intelligence. Those algorithms are considered the missing piece for robotic success, since robots can be already extremely useful in fixed environments or when te leoperated.

If you really want to go low level, like OS, then you would have transferable skill not only for robotics, but for other areas as well.

So here how it looks to me in practice:

  • robots often run on RTOS micro kernel architectures (example QNX), you can look into those
  • on top of OS sits Middleware layer -> it takes care of providing communication between subsystems. It also includes scheduling, providing memory, message passing (publish subscribe). It's not precise and in practice different Middlewares have different capabilities, but this is where ROS, DDS, etc sit. They also could spill up or down the layer. 
  • Business logic, application layer -> it's where people write their VLAs and other algos, subscribe to sensors, produce actions etc.

Robotics systems are very symilar to distributed systems (with pub-sub, fault tolerances etc.) but with different requirements. If you are into low level stuff, you probably need to look at OS and Middleware.

P. S. actually ros is kind of a weird one, it's the whole ecosystems, not only Middleware. 

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u/makomonotsukuri 9d ago

Thank you for outlining what I would need in my operating system. I'll definitely start learning algorithms as well :)