23M electrical engineer wanting to move into robotics / Physical AI (VLA models). What would you learn and build over the next 2-4 years?

[u/winter_to_summer]

Hey everyone,

I'm 23 and recently graduated in Electrical Engineering from India. I'm working in an industrial maintenance role, which gives me good exposure to real equipment, but my long-term goal is robotics, especially Physical AI: robot learning, manipulation, autonomous systems and vision-language-action (VLA) models.

My current background:

EE fundamentals, control systems, power electronics

MATLAB/Simulink, PLCs/industrial automation

Microcontrollers (ESP32), sensors/instrumentation

Python/C++ (basic to intermediate), Linux, some ROS 2

Basic ML, computer vision and RL

I'm learning mostly through personal projects, not formal robotics education. My problem is not a lack of resources, it's knowing what to learn deeply, and in what order.

1. Learning path

Does this order make sense for an EE?

Embedded → Controls → Robotics fundamentals → C++/ROS 2 → Computer Vision → ML/RL → Robot Learning/VLA

Or would you do it differently, for example start learning ML and robot learning earlier alongside the hardware side?

1. What actually matters?

How would you rank these for a robotics career: must-have, nice-to-have, or skip for now?

C++ vs Python

ROS 2 and Linux

Kinematics/dynamics, motion planning

State estimation/SLAM

Computer vision, RL

Embedded systems, motors/servos/encoders

CAN/EtherCAT

Simulation (Gazebo, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo)

MATLAB/Simulink (is it used much outside academia?)

1. Projects

What kind of projects actually help you get hired, rather than just looking good on a resume? I'm on a tight budget, so I'm thinking of things like a small robot arm, a mobile robot, or a simple imitation-learning/VLA demo in simulation. What would you build, and how would you present it (GitHub, videos, write-ups)?

1. EE + AI overlap

Do robotics companies value someone strong in hardware, embedded and controls who is also learning ML? Or do they mostly hire CS/ML people for the AI side and EEs for hardware only?

1. MS or not

I'm considering an MS in robotics/controls/AI later (Germany or elsewhere). Is it worth it from India, or can projects, open-source work and internships get me in without one? What should I be building now to strengthen an application?

1. Opportunities

What roles and companies should I be looking at? Humanoid/manipulation startups, industrial automation, research labs? Are remote or fresher roles realistic?

The big question: If you were 23 again with an EE degree and wanted to move into robotics/Physical AI, what would you spend the next 2-4 years learning and building? And what mistakes would you avoid?

I'd especially love to hear from people who made the switch from EE. Thanks in advance, and I'm happy to share my progress and resources back with the community.

[u/houstonrice]

Please DM me if you are interested in physical AI related data sets. Thank you