Robotics career

[MrJammin]

What do you think would be the best undergraduate degree to pursue if you wanted to go to graduate school for robotics research? Is that a mostly CS field, or is their a fair share of Electrical or Computer Engineers in it as well?

 

[dknguyen]

It's everything. That's why it's robotics. Now choose the part of the robot you want to work on. The intelligence algorithms? Control algorithms? The computer hardware? The computer high-level software? Low level software? (or perhaps you'd like to do in hardware what programmers do in software?)The rest of the electrical hardware? Take your pick!

Don't forget about mechanical engineering either...can't have any robots without them (and surely not flying ones).

I chose electrical because it sits between computer and mechanical (computing science was crossed off the list very early on for me since I knew I didn't want to spend all my time coding high level systems and certaintly wanted to learn some hardware as well). If you want to do a lot of intelligence stuff, CompSci is good. However, it often depends on how you approach the problem- electrical engineers can also do a lot of that stuff too but often approach it differently (doing things in hardware rather than software). I didn't choose computer engineering because it limits you too far with regards to things like electrical drives.

Like you can spend all day trying to code vision algorithms as a software engineering, or spend all day desigining hardware to do the same thing as a computer or electrical engineer.

 

[Pommie]

Some Universities are now doing degrees in mechatronics. My local Uni has one such course - **broken link removed**. Whether this is a jack of all trades and master of none is yet to be seen.

Mike.

 

[Papabravo]

What do you think would be the best undergraduate degree to pursue if you wanted to go to graduate school for robotics research? Is that a mostly CS field, or is their a fair share of Electrical or Computer Engineers in it as well?

Don't know about the background of the academics who do such research. I think a more fundamental question would be; where is the funding coming from and will it be there when I'm ready? There is nothing worse then setting out to accomplish a goal only to find not only the rug pulled out from under you but the entire building right down to the furnishings gone!. Are you sure that such research is even being done?

 

[dknguyen]

*cough*army*cough*

 

[Papabravo]

Well the military can giveth and the military can taketh away. This is especially true when there are more players than dollars.

So where is the research? They need little robots to look around corners and pick up land mines. Since they might tend to have a high mortality rate they need to be cheap. Doesn't seem like much research is involved, lota engineering though.