Ask HN: How to transition into Robotics

As I describe before here https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/heres-how-you-can-stay-ahe..., many roboticists overlook the need for JavaScript in their skill set and tech stack. This is because of the evolution of robotics projects and companies: first you build a prototype and only then do you deploy and scale your fleet. The first part is hard and doesn't require any JS. But the second part is even harder and requires a ton of JS, because without web-tooling you won't be able to operate efficiently. This offers a great opportunity for roboticists to distinguish themselves from others be mastering JS for both the backend (rosnodejs, rclnodejs) and the front-end (React, Transitive Robotics). This sets you apart from both "regular" roboticists and from "pure" web developers.

What I'm trying to say: robotics is a very broad field and your current full-stack skills are needed just as well. And while working on those aspects of the robotics stack you can learn about the rest if you want. But you don't even have to to progress in your career in the robotics industry.

If you want to work on something specific, you can try to build a capability ("full-stack app") on Transitive, the open-source full-stack framework for robotics we've built that works with any robots, esp. ROS ones: https://github.com/transitiverobotics/transitive. Oh and of course learn ROS along the way.

I did this, though Robotics is adjacent for me. My software is still web tech interfacing with robots. If I wanted to, I could probably transfer internally to do more direct work with robots.

The way I did it was to find robotics companies that needed a web dev. I had to stick with it for a bit because either a bad match or in one case they withdrew the opening (I’m 90% sure they were about to hire me too)

My current company is ROS specific. It wouldn’t hurt you to learn ROS stuff as it’s quite popular.

Robotics is sorely lacking front end devs and UI/UX guys. Most companies won’t hire any until they are already pretty established, but they might hire some. You can check out companies like foxglove who make GUI tools that robotics companies then pay to use.

I’ve worked in robotics before. Since you mentioned backend I think getting familiar with ROS and LCM and other middleware would be helpful to you. If you have spare time, you could play around with writing drivers for motors that you buy, but it’s less specific to your skill set which in my opinion probably consists of sending and ingesting data, especially event-based systems.

Find example companies, find their current or past jobs postings (maybe use the wayback machine), and identify the specific technology and techniques they request. Use that to write a map and plan.

Start using those technologies and building things. Write or at least post about it on X and follow related engineers on X. See kache's robotics journeyman community as one place for inspiration.

If there is a local FIRST robotics team, especially at the FRC level, consider volunteering to help out. At the larger events, you will even be able to make contact with parts vendors and other organizations.

How do you feel about inverse kinematics?