Roadmap to Robotics — Part 2

Read the first part of Roadmap to Robotics Series here — https://kajal-gada.medium.com/roadmap-to-robotics-part-1-10c7274c1526

Level 2 Intermediate

You come to level 2 Robotics with the mindset of you are intested in learning Robotics. In here you need to learn a lot of concepts and different skills. Robotics has a lot of sub-fields. You have to know the basics of few of these to proceed further and more importantly you have to figure out which sub-field of Robotics you want to pursue. Plus you have to pick up skills. One such one being ROS.

🤖 There is no right way of doing this and it is a tricky part in Robotics. So here is how I thought of this — a series of skills and projects.

Mindset

• Learning just skills will seem like you are not making progress, so better to get mix of skills and projects. Each of this project allows you to pick up knowledge, test a sub-field and develop a skill. This isn’t going to be perfect, it is okay if you end up skipping some of it.
• You can choose to do these projects with actual hardware or just in simulation. That being said, it is a good idea to do at least one project using hardware. This will teach you to work with real robots.
• If you find a sub-field that you want to continue on with, then you can head on over to Level 3 where I mention specific algorithms, projects, libraries, etc for a sub-field.
• Lastly, I am choosing to focus on mobile robots and robotics software engineering because that is what I know most about. If you have a liking towards other areas such as drones, you will have to pick and choose or modify some of it for what works best for you.

OS and Command Line

While you can pursue Robotics from any Operating System (OS), it is best to switch over to Ubuntu. You can create a partition on your existing computer or laptop to have multiple OS. You can also make use of software like Parallel. I would avoid virtual machines as they don’t run smoothly.

Get familiar with command line (aka terminal) to do the following:

• Navigate file system — go to a particular file or folder, find a file.
• Download and install software packages.
• Compile and run code
• To open and edit a file — copy-paste, delete, etc. Popular tools…