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I've been under the impression that getting into robotics has never been easier. For the past 10-15 years, high-schools have had easy access to things like Lego
by TrackerFF 2y ago
I've been under the impression that getting into robotics has never been easier. For the past 10-15 years, high-schools have had easy access to things like Lego mindstorms, etc.
Small microcontrollers and computers like Arduino, Raspberry Pi has made development much easier, as you're no longer stuck with writing Assembly or C to get something working, and there are tons of modules that are easy to interface against.
Back when I started out playing with robots, as part of my microcontroller and control engineering classes, we were stuck with writing ASM. Same with components, like motor controllers, sensor networks, and what not. Lots of vero and perfboard, lots of soldering.
- spieswl 2y agoBecause it is. There is an abundance of tutorials showing people how to get Gazebo simulations going, or set up a rudimentary classifier in Pytorch, or actuate motors with Arduino using whatever framework of the week (I even wrote some!). The hardware has really made strides too, easy and cheap sensors, controllers, cameras. It's awesome how quickly someone can plug-and-play a Realsense with a servomotor or pneumatic slide and start manipulating the world. The thing that's usually underappreciated is that once you understand how to code a robot, you are barely closer to having solved a practical problem. There are lots of practical problems in the world where spending 4 hours learning how to use $PERCEPTION_API would be actually better spent spending 4 hours understanding more about the widget being perceived or the object being manipulated. Getting into robotics has never been easier, getting something useful out of robotics is still the trick.