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Getting into robotics as a software engineer

by bouk on 2/10/24, 10:30 AM with 100 comments

• by AnarchismIsCool on 2/11/24, 3:55 PM

  Some concepts that you'll need to get familiar with:

  Real time operating systems. Less fancy than they sound but the devil is in the details. Robots need things to happen at a certain speed and at the right time so we have a type of scheduler (that can be patched into the linux kernel) that sacrifices absolute throughput to try and guarantee tasks start inside a particular window. Funny enough, if you've done game development and recognize that everything needs to happen inside 1/60th of a second or better, you know some of the hard parts here.

  Memory mapped addresses. C is scary but ultimately fairly simple. Once you get the hang of doing silly things with pointers and arrays, the next step is dealing with microcontrollers. You probably wonder how they do anything without an operating system though, and the answer is memory mapped IO. They have a fully flat memory space, starting with 0x0 and going up from there. That space usually contains basically everything from your stack, heap, flash storage, and all the peripherals like GPIO, I2C, SPI, serial, and so on. You can literally do things like int* x = 0x12345678; *x = 0x1; to turn on an LED because the device is listening for changes to that address to set the output state.

  There's a ton of other stuff, but these are the gateways to understanding the space you're dealing with at a basic level.

• by msadowski on 2/11/24, 1:29 PM

  My journey is a little bit opposite to the author’s: I studied robotics and started learning programming by myself to create software for robots. There are two observations I have that can be useful to people making the software->robotics journey.

  * Agile for software-hardware is hard if not impossible. For software it can be reasonable, but it’s really hard to iterate on both hardware and software at the same time. It’s easier if the hardware designed is locked or the process involves waterfall on the hardware side. * I often found that people that come from pure software to robotics don’t have control experience and something that can be easily solved with a PID controller end up being a custom code that ends up being way more complicated than needed.

• by bemusedthrow75 on 2/11/24, 1:44 PM

  This is very interesting.

  But quite a lot of CS people -- well at least I hope it is not just me -- end up on the web development trajectory despite or because of having less than good enough understanding of e.g. trigonometry, geometry and calculus... all of which start to matter a lot when you are starting to make things; especially things that move and consume electricity.

  I am a good programmer but a weak mathematician. I have a 3D printer now, and I'm starting to learn FreeCAD and microcontroller stuff actively rather than just reading about it, and run up against my maths weakness all the time.

  I have recently discovered the three books Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron wrote:

  https://www.makershed.com/products/make-trigonometry-print

  https://www.makershed.com/products/make-calculus-print

  https://www.makershed.com/products/make-geometry

• by eschneider on 2/10/24, 11:00 AM

  Nice article. As someone who's also gotten into robotics from the software side, I'd also suggest learning a bit about the hardware side. If you're doing anything with custom boards and board bring-up, you'll need to be able to read a schematic and data sheet at a basic level. Being able to use an oscilloscope and logic analyzer is also _very_ useful. None of this stuff is terribly hard, but it's nice to know what to expect.

• by AYBABTME on 2/11/24, 1:50 PM

  I often feel the same urge to work on soft/hard stuff. Not sure why I don't actually do it. Although the current stuff I work on is very cool on its own and not Candy Crush. But it's really a scourge on this world that the top tier pay in the industry is to shove ads in front of people.

  So I do physical things in my personal projects and then come to realize that the potential return on investment (time spent vs. expected money) would be peanuts in comparison to pure software. I would love to know of hardware related work that has decent margins. Or at least enough margins to justify paying a good salary to enough engineers to sustain them.

• by NordSteve on 2/11/24, 4:43 PM

  If you have a team nearby, go work with a FIRST Robotics Competition team as a mentor/volunteer. Great community, you'll learn a lot, and make great connections if you want to get into this area as a career.

• by kaycebasques on 2/11/24, 8:09 PM

  The article itself was a bit too holier-than-thou for me but I want more robotics content here on HN so let's hijack this thread and share robotics passion!!

  My own shitty first foray into robotics is an RPi that I can talk to [2].

  If you didn't see "the coolest robot I've ever built" you gotta watch that... so inspiring [3]

  Latent Space has a robotics demo day coming up, pretty curious to see what comes out of that [4]

  Some stream-of-conscious thoughts about why I'm drawn to robotics:

  * The maker / hacker / homebrew communities that are basically just using robots to express art. Maker Faire, Burning Man, etc.

  * The satisfaction of writing code and seeing something physical happen. Last week I was trying to figure out how to get a shitty third party Amazon robot hat [5] to actually do something useful so I was iterating through the GPIOs and I somehow made it actually smoke. I'm weirdly proud of messing up so badly that my hardware actually smoked!

  * The joy of demystifying hardware and learning all the layers of abstraction just within hardware

  [2] https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/STTTGTS.html

  [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38162881

  [4] https://lu.ma/latent-space-final-frontiers

  [5] A Xmas present from my sweet wife, really touching that she's encouraging me to actually pursue my interest in robotics

• by mdorazio on 2/11/24, 1:53 PM

  Really wish the author would have commented on salary. I personally think the reason more people don't end up on the hardware/robotics side is that the questionable-value fintech/adtech/socialtech pure software side of the world pays so much better and most developers follow the money.

• by chris_st on 2/11/24, 12:47 PM

  I've occasionally thought it would be fun (not necessarily productive!) to do something like the experiments folks have done with Genetic Algorithms, having simulated robots learn to walk, etc. in a simulated physics environment. The interesting bit would be to do it with real legs, sensors, servos, etc., to try to build up a "naive physics" library that can deal with balance, etc., by learning from physical experience rather than starting with equations of motion.

  That may be the most number of times I've typed "etc." in a paragraph.

• by ih on 2/11/24, 9:18 PM

  I'm just getting into robotics with a background in software and I ended up choosing the Isaac Sim platform/ecosystem (https://docs.omniverse.nvidia.com/isaacsim/latest/index.html) and Jetbot (https://jetbot.org/master/) since they seem suited for neural networks and reinforcement learning. So far getting up and running with the simulation side hasn't been too bad and there is a model for the Jetbot in Isaac Sim since it's also by Nvidia. I haven't started on the hardware side so can't speak on that. The downside for some might be it's proprietary and Jetbot itself is a bit out of date and nearing end of life support.

• by manuel_w on 2/11/24, 1:01 PM

  This is completely unrelated to the article the OP posted other than it's also related to robotics. But it's the coolest robot project I found recently. And since readers of this thread are likely to be interested in robotics (I am!), it might of interest to some:

  https://www.allesblinkt.com/projects/round-about-four-dimens...

  Hope this is not considered too off-topic here.

• by andrew_eu on 2/11/24, 2:37 PM

  What would be a good starting platform for a programmable drone?

  The article suggests playing around with a Raspberry Pi Pico, but this is a bit bare bones. Are there any kits, or entry level programmable drones on the market with a reasonable toolchain to program sequences?

• by tonmoy on 2/11/24, 1:53 PM

  As someone who works in making physical things, I disagree with the premise that the world of bits and bytes does not have impact. We will always need to manage resources including humans at a large scale and web apps are the best way to do that.

• by choonway on 2/11/24, 3:27 PM

  The best way to get into it without investing money in all that hardware is to play with a simulator. My preference is CoppeliaSim - due to it's user friendliness.

  https://www.coppeliarobotics.com/

  But take your pick there are many to choose from.

  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15691...

• by blah-yeah on 2/12/24, 5:13 PM

  Make magazine has a great magazine on getting into robotics via the Battle Bots type of robots.

  I think it was an issue from 2022 or 2023 (not enough energy currently to track down the issue in their catalog)

  Here's an article on their site about the topic:

  https://makezine.com/tag/battlebots/

• by tamimio on 2/11/24, 8:34 PM

  As long as software folks don’t bring their shenanigans (agile/scum (ahmm scrum) approach, daily stand up, ticket based management, ship products within 2 weeks, among others) into the robotics/engineering world, you are welcome. I have seen many cases of software “project or engineering managers” ruin a whole department because they were trying to force such stupid approaches, it’s always ironic seeing some are trying to force agile for example even though the whole idea of agile is being..agile.

• by tester756 on 2/11/24, 2:58 PM

  If only anything closer to hardware wasnt paying this bad...

  A lot of SEs leave industries like semiconductors for web dev jobs that pay waay better

• by Animats on 2/11/24, 9:57 PM

  This might be a good time to get into robotics. For a long time, industrial robots were really dumb. Then there was a round of false enthusiasm for "intelligent robots" (Rethink Robotics went down that rathole.) Now, at last, compute power, vision, and AI are cheap enough that you can get something done.

  The components are much better. Batteries are better. Motors are better. Radio communications work. Cameras are cheap. Short-range LIDAR is affordable. Navigation systems work. Robotics work used to require using a lot of time building custom solutions for those problems. Now you can just order components.

  Here's an idea I'd like to see revisited. Back in the 1980s, someone built a pair of small forklifts that operated as a team. These were little things, about half a meter cubed, with maybe 50cm of lift. Individually, they couldn't do much. But a pair working together could pick up and move a couch, with one robot lifting each end. In the 1980s, the researchers had trouble coordinating two mobile robots. Communications alone were a big problem. Not today.

  There are many material handling tasks where one small robot isn't enough, and a big machine the size of a forklift is too bulky. But teams of small robots might work.

  I still have a small robot arm on my desk, but it's not connected to anything.

• by moffkalast on 2/11/24, 2:03 PM

  > Also, if you’re not already, you should get into writing Rust. The powerful type system and safety is incredible. The build tooling and ecosystem is much better than C++ et al. Rust for embedded is not there yet, but improving all the time.

  Meh, maybe in a decade. ROS has no official support for it either. Robotics is still very much a C++ town and will probably remain as such for a long while as long as people remain stubbornly set in their ways. If you apply as a Rust only dev to a robotics company nobody will take you seriously.

• by hcks on 2/11/24, 2:54 PM

  “You should base your life decisions on the koolaid flavour you prefer”

• by richrichie on 2/11/24, 1:58 PM

  “ An app is not going to house people, feed them or put them on Mars. We can’t solve climate change with smarter software”

  Yes it can and we can.

  Software has been a critical component of much progress we have made over the last few decades.

  I understand the difficulty with the abstract many people have. Some may think Hilbert spaces are not real. For many they are as real as any space around them. Some live in them !