Robotics Engineer

I'm always getting email asking about how one goes about becoming a robotics engineer. Robotics may be the most inter-disciplinary of engineering endeavors. A mechanical engineer will design the robot's structure, its joint mechanisms, bearings, heat transfer characteristics, etc. Electrical engineers design the robot's control electronics, power amplifiers, signal conditioning, etc. Electro-mechanical engineers may work on the robot's sensors. Computer engineers will design the robot's computing hardware. Robot kinematics is great application of mathematics applied to robotics engineering. An undergraduate college degree in any of these fields is an excellent way to get started as a robotics engineer.

So you want to be a robotics engineer? Software engineering is probably the Achilles heel of robotics. The mechanical, electrical and computer engineers have built awesome machines, but they still are extremely difficult to put into production. This is because they are so difficult to teach. An expert technician `has to program the robot's every motion down to the tiniest minutia. In my opinion, the biggest contributions yet to be made in robotics will come from the software engineers. Companies are hiring robotics engineers to develop everything from automated vacuum cleaners to robot dogs. On the industrial side, robot sales topped $1.6 billion last year, up 60 percent from 1998.

Here's how I became a robotics engineer. It started with trying to build a robotic hand as a teenager in my parent's garage. This was after I first learned how servo systems worked. I barely got the servo part working, but it was a start. Later I went to college to get an undergraduate degree as an electrical engineer. After that I worked as an electrical engineer for three years. I designed several automatic control systems that were very interesting. One of them controlled a motor with an armature as big as a phone booth! Then I went back to school, this time as a mechanical engineer, and completed the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum. After that it was a Master's degree in biomedical engineering and the PhD where I focused on robotics.