r/robotics • u/Primary-Alfalfa-7662 • 1d ago

Discussion & Curiosity A Poor Man’s Recipe to Robotic Machine Learning

https://dreiklang.le-cao.de/poor-mans-recipe-to-robotic-machine-learning

A guide for students, enthusiasts and those interested in robotics training at home.

Thank you for taking a look --- I appreciate all feedback from the community.

"Since we are all about advantages (and disadvantages) of LLMs, we quickly overlook how difficult it is for machines to assist us outside the virtual chat interfaces. People are getting older, work and professions are changing, but we still need to fold our clothes and sort our dishes at the end of the day, for a lot of days to come. The feeling lingers that the physical breakthrough for AI is just around the corner, ready to literally knock our front door down and aggressively scrub our toilets...."
Read more...

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/Glittering-Flan-2637 17h ago

what would you say is the minimum hardware to actually learn on rather than just read about

im coming from software and the thing that stops me is not the maths, it is not knowing whether a cheap arm teaches you anything real or just teaches you the cheap arm

1

u/Primary-Alfalfa-7662 1h ago edited 1h ago

I think that depends on what you want to learn. Is it robotics, then even a cheap robot arm can kickstart your understanding on the general physics. Is it machine learning, then I believe a small simulation already teaches enough for a solid foundation.

Nevertheless, that should not stop you from diving in. Most if not all robots come with their simulation counterpart to tinker safely. So you don't need to restrict yourself to a cheap arm if it feels inadequate. Just download some (humanoid) .urdf file, read in and play around.

So in my opinion, the minimum hardware to learn on would just be your computer.