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How Do You Get Into Robotics?
Chosen Reject asks: "With Voyager I passing the 100 AU mark, and the Mars Rovers continuing to work longer than expected, there's been a lot of talk about robotics. There are cars that can park without humans, the DARPA Grand Challenge, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, and even the X-Prize. NASA has the pros, the others have all levels of amateurs, but where does a newbie go to learn about robotics? Obviously I can't start out with the next Mars Rover, but where do I go to learn how to make a simple robotic arm that can hold my can of Root Beer?"
F.I.R.S.T. did it for me. :-)
http://www.usfirst.org/
Yay, I have a sig.
I don't get it. What's so funny about the parent? He's quite right, actually. A Lego Mindstorm control module gives you a programmable computer hooked up to electromechanical parts. The legos provide a rapid prototyping tool for the robot's body. So it's a "real" robot, even if the Legos limit the extent to which you can take the final product.
:)
Seriously, this isn't rocket science. It's all about making a machine, then programming it to do something that we humans think is intelligent. (Or at least, not too stupid.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
There are academic programs, but the US robotics industry is tiny. I have a slide I use in talks; it compares total spending on robots, mobile robots, and ringtones. Ringtones are far bigger.
Robot R&D in Japan is serious, but in the US, it's the same old academic groups grinding away. The number of US commercial companies shipping products in the mobile robot space is very small, as is number of units shipped. Above the Roomba/toy level, there just aren't any volume applications. This seriously limits job and business prospects. There's a market in teleoperators for bomb disposal applications, and the machinery developed for that is quite nice, but it's not autonomous.
Even industrial robotics and factory automation is declining in the US. With manufacturing moving offshore to low-wage countries, the end of union labor, and a huge supply of illegal immigrants, plants are less automated than they were twenty years ago. The original Macintosh had less assembly labor in it than today's PCs. I can't recommend a US career in manufacturing engineering today.
Robot hardware is better than ever. The Lego Mindstorms stuff is primitive, but around $1000, things get quite good. Check out RoboNova. Further upscale, see Mobile Robots, Inc.
The theory is getting better. Vision is starting to work. Planning actually works in the real world now. Adaptive control and learning finally work. There's enough CPU power to do hard stuff in real time on cheap hardware. Much is technically possible. But the market isn't there.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams. That didn't really lead anywhere. The two best young people we had are doing very well, but not in robotics. One is running a hedge fund and one is working for an offshore derivatives fund. Of the older people, one is running a big web server farm, and one has retired. If you understand all the practical stuff and all the theoretical stuff to operate at that level, you can do very well at other things. But the payoff isn't in robotics.
This field needs a killer app.
You'd be surprised at the amount of lego used by scientists in quick setups.
There's a surprising amount of things that can be done with Mindstorms. You can even use a wide variety of alternative programming languages such as robotC or leJos a form of Java. These are just two of many different projects.
Just have a look around and you'll find lots of different pages about modding, and making custom bricks. It's much more potent than any of the "build your own robot-arm" type of kits. (which you can also do with Mindstorms)