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Ok, so I'm thinking the need for this could become huge. How does one get into this industry as a programmer? What would I need to learn? What kind of diplomas

by leke 12y ago

Ok, so I'm thinking the need for this could become huge. How does one get into this industry as a programmer? What would I need to learn? What kind of diplomas are useful? What should I start practising on?

monocasa 12y ago
As someone who's been trying to hire for a robotics programmer for a long time: Need to have: Systems/RTOS experience. ie. not spend a week chasing your tail when you stupidly put a printf in an ISR which changes timing so the code works, but then when you pull out the printf it stops working. Be able to read schematics and datasheets. I'm not expecting you to design a board (we have EEs for that), but you should absolutely be able to be given a schematic and a datasheet and then write a driver for a simple peripheral. Basic understanding of control theory. Being able to articulate what a PID loop is and why open control loops are a bad idea is probably good enough. Being a self directed learner. Robotics tends to be fairly low volumes all things considered (or atleast my branch of it). We have issues with vendor support not really caring about what happens to us since our volumes are so low. We therefore have to own significantly more of our tooling and have to be able to peer in to what our vendors would prefer to be treated as black boxes quite a bit. Any RE experience would go a really long way here in my book. Nice to have: Good understanding of mechanical engineering/physics terms like stiction. Ostensibly if you have the skillsets written above this you can be taught this, but this lowers the bar for hiring you quite a bit.
- angersock 12y ago
  Would you mind shooting me an email? I know some folks that are looking for work, and at the very least I'd be interested to hear more about what your business looks like.
- mkramlich 12y ago
  so... not just a pass through a Rails/Node.js tutorial then? you've just eliminated perhaps 90% of the folks who've recently decided to switch to "hacker" as their career! ;-)
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  So where does one find robotics programming jobs? Because that mostly sounds familiar.
Animats 12y ago
It's still a small industry. Kiva is a few hundred people. iRobot is 528 people. Boston Dynamics was about a hundred before the Google acquisition. Some of the industrial automation employees are bigger, but many of their employees are at field sites, installing and fixing systems.

by leke 12y ago

monocasa 12y ago

As someone who's been trying to hire for a robotics programmer for a long time: Need to have: Systems/RTOS experience. ie. not spend a week chasing your tail when you stupidly put a printf in an ISR which changes timing so the code works, but then when you pull out the printf it stops working. Be able to read schematics and datasheets. I'm not expecting you to design a board (we have EEs for that), but you should absolutely be able to be given a schematic and a datasheet and then write a driver for a simple peripheral. Basic understanding of control theory. Being able to articulate what a PID loop is and why open control loops are a bad idea is probably good enough. Being a self directed learner. Robotics tends to be fairly low volumes all things considered (or atleast my branch of it). We have issues with vendor support not really caring about what happens to us since our volumes are so low. We therefore have to own significantly more of our tooling and have to be able to peer in to what our vendors would prefer to be treated as black boxes quite a bit. Any RE experience would go a really long way here in my book. Nice to have: Good understanding of mechanical engineering/physics terms like stiction. Ostensibly if you have the skillsets written above this you can be taught this, but this lowers the bar for hiring you quite a bit.

angersock 12y ago
Would you mind shooting me an email? I know some folks that are looking for work, and at the very least I'd be interested to hear more about what your business looks like.
mkramlich 12y ago
so... not just a pass through a Rails/Node.js tutorial then? you've just eliminated perhaps 90% of the folks who've recently decided to switch to "hacker" as their career! ;-)
TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
So where does one find robotics programming jobs? Because that mostly sounds familiar.

Animats 12y ago

It's still a small industry. Kiva is a few hundred people. iRobot is 528 people. Boston Dynamics was about a hundred before the Google acquisition. Some of the industrial automation employees are bigger, but many of their employees are at field sites, installing and fixing systems.