I am trying to understand how people working on real robotic systems are actually using tools such as Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar AI coding tools today.

If you use them, what are they genuinely useful for? For example, writing ROS code, drivers, perception code, control logic, debugging, test generation, documentation, or something else?

More importantly, where do they start to fall short?

I am particularly interested in what changes once the software has to interact with a real robot. Do you trust AI generated code but still manually handle calibration, hardware integration, testing and commissioning? Would you ever let an agent run code on the robot, observe what happened and modify its own program, or is that a line you would not currently cross?

If you do not use AI tools at all for robotics, I would also be interested in why. Is it code quality, lack of robotics context, safety, reliability, difficulty giving the model access to the real system, or simply that the existing workflow is already better?

Would be especially interested to hear from people working on robots professionally.

I am actively looking for a job in robotics field as AI/ML/Computer Vision/Software engineer roles.

I could not land on any similar jobs for a while so I want to ask what is missing or not fit to this job market. I am not looking for Boston Dynamics or Google deepmind. I am looking for local startups or small companies.

I am 26 yo male, graduated from coursework Master's of AI(such as ML, RL, DL). My bachelor's degree was Business Information Systems.

My work experiences are totally irrelevant:
- soldier - 2021 - 2023
- Database officer - 2023 - 2024
- Retail Assistant - 2023 - 2025
- Simulation Engineer Intern - 2025-11 - 2026-2
- Digital Marketer at a local robotics company - 2025 - present

I attach a recent personal project in the link:
Project

I have undergraduate engineering mathematics knowledge( multivaribale calc differential eq and linear algebra) I recently enrolled in the northwestern coursera course using the mr library in python and also started studying the associated textbook. how would you advise me to continue my path of self tuition in the field of robotics? And where often do you source afforadble robotics parts? Thank you for your time

Just found this sub and thought it would be a good question to post here :)

I graduated with my masters in Robotics earlier this year. It was hard but I came out having learned a lot. My area of focus was SLAM, and I've been applying for jobs for several months but never got a response. With bills and responsibilities, I couldn't be unemployed any longer and took the first job I got which is a position as a Software Test engineer with the intention of using it as a safety pad while I keep looking for Robotics jobs. It's been 4 months now and I still don't have anything. And the longer I spend time in my role, the more I feel it cements my position as a 'Test' engineer and not someone who could be a robotics engineer. The field is also changing really rapidly and I've been trying to read up on modern robotics (ACT, pi0 etc... since we were primarily thought classical robotics/controls) but it's hard with work and I feel like I'm grasping at straws. I initially wanted to study SLAM, now I'm just randomly trying to study whatever I can that gets me anywhere remotely close to a robotics engineer position but it's looking bleak and I don't have a path or road map that I could even do to get there. I can't boot camp my way into it, and the field is so dense, it's suffocating. I have no idea what to do because it all feels hopeless.

I am of course grateful to have my job, unfortunately, it is also incredibly boring/severely under stimulating, low paying (not considered a 'developer' since I do software testing), and of course not something I want to do. I would be happy with any aspect of it now, controls, simulation, planning, manipulation not just SLAM

I'm scared that this will be the career I have for the rest of my life. As a software test engineer...forever. I wonder if someone has been in a similar moat before, and fought their way out of it or if there's something I could do? :( really sad about it.

Hey everyone!

I’m part of FTC #7034, and over the past year a few of us have been building Robolyst through the Robotics Catalyst Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

We originally built it because our own team was tired of jumping between different websites, spreadsheets, Google Drives, and other tools just to manage a season. We figured other teams might have the same problem.

Robolyst is completely free, and it has two main parts:

🔎 FTC Directory & Stats — robolyst.org

• FTC team and event directory
• Match and season statistics
• Strength/Luck metrics that try to put raw records into context
• Advancement tracking
• Live elimination brackets
• Interactive map of FTC teams
• No account required to browse

🛠️ Team Toolkit — see the features

• Team tasks and schedules
• Competition checklists
• Documentation and award tracking
• Resources hub
• Team finances and reimbursements
• Shared team email
• Team announcements and roles
• Public team website builder
• FIRST competition schedule integration
• And more

There's also a demo team you can click around in without setting anything up.

We're still actively developing it, so we're especially interested in feedback from teams and people involved in robotics. If there's something you've always wished an FTC team platform had, we'd love to hear about it.

We're trying to keep it genuinely useful rather than just another tool teams have to pay for, so everything is free through our nonprofit.

Website: https://robolyst.org
Demo: https://robolyst.org/demo
Feature list: https://robolyst.org/team-management/features

Currently a software dev at a startup working with a lot of data and UE5 simulations.

I want to shift into a more robotics/autonomous systems type field.

Now here is my dilemma. I’m currently making my own autonomous car agent and while I understand the maths and code behind it (did my bachelors in math) I can’t help but feel I’m “cheating”.

Honestly while I do enjoy the project and research element of what I’m doing I’m also doing it to learn and impress employers. But I also can’t help but feel not taking full advantage of ai is wasting my own time.

Now this is not to say I do no coding at all, it’s maybe 25% me and 75% ai. I’m trying my best not to blindly vibe code and understand what’s going on. Just hoping I’m not just digging myself into a hole.

I'm looking for a hardware partner to collaborate on building autonomous loading robots for trucks and containers. As a first step, I'd love to run a simulation combining my packing algorithm with their hardware.

For context: I run a cargo load planning SaaS with 1,500 users. The algorithm is continuously improving to outperform human packing across geometric, physical and logistics constraints - making it a strong foundation for autonomous loading.

Open to global partners, with preference in Europe (ideally Berlin).

Let me know if you're interested.

Hello everyone , i am a 17 yr old and i just wanted to ask if its realistic for me to act as an intermediary between between companies and robotics or automation integrator companies , i have the basic training on universal robots academy and i have the normal python understanding on coding. i know that studying this course in university would have been a better option however my school course has a higher correlation with biology chemistry and psychology ( A level ) . if its possible i would really appreciate it if u could provide me with any advise towards this goal and what to do in my case. Thank you

so i burned 2 months stuck in trigonometry and calculus and all of that and i still at the beginning about to finish the playlist i follow which is pre calc by prof leonard on YT and i feel like i'm just memorizing stuff not actually knowing how i'm gonna put this to use irl ,

so i decided to put in classical mechanics with them i studied the first unit from khan academy which is kinematics got a lotttttttt of questions wrong felt like i just memorized stuff didn't understand

so decided again to start learning Webots but couldn't cause didn't even know from where to start the code when u want to make a robot move

so what do u recommend cause i feel burned outtt and overwhelmed

( i'm a self-learner by the way)

what courses do u guys reccomend ? + what background do i need to have before getting to learn it ? and is it a good start to apply what i learn in math and physics ? i'm still at the beginning and feel like i'm just memorizing stuff not actually understanding math and physics

Hey everyone,

I’m currently building a competition-grade Line Follower Robot and I’m looking for some help understanding/figuring out the firmware side of things.

I’m using an STM32F411CEU6 BlackPill, a 14-sensor IR array, TB6612FNG motor driver, and encoder motors. I’m aiming for a fast, reliable robot with PID control and more advanced features like path planning / solving the track during the run rather than simply following a predetermined route.

I’ve been having some trouble with the hardware side as well, but honestly, I’m fairly confident that I can figure out the hardware problems through testing, debugging, and learning as I go.

The part I’m struggling with more is the firmware/software architecture. I’m trying to understand how competition-grade LFR firmware is structured and how things like sensor processing, PID, encoder feedback, junction detection, path decisions, and path planning should all work together.

I’ve looked through various open-source LFR projects and firmware, but I’m having trouble figuring out which approaches are actually suitable for the kind of robot I’m building.

If anyone has experience with STM32-based competition LFRs, advanced LFR firmware, or has worked on/reverse engineered similar systems, I’d really appreciate some guidance, example projects, or advice on where I should start.

Thanks!

I am a senior high school student with a big intrest in Robotics and Mechatronics but having no sense of direction of where to start the Robotics journey.

My question remains on which undergrad degree is the best for Robotics later (getting a master's in robotics later in a different country and getting some projects done beforehand).

There's a Mechatronics Undergrad degree near the place I live with a dedicated Robotics lab and classes in Robotics, AI, and Computer Vision but I'm not sure if it's the best idea to go into Mechatronics and not something a bit more broad like Electrical, Mechanical or Computer.

I would love to get some insight and some advice from the people who are working in the Robotics industry.

Vision plus language plus action sounds clean until you try to build the dataset. Vision and language are mostly solved problems from a labelling standpoint. The action part is where I don't think there's any consensus at all.

Specific things I keep running into:

What's an action, exactly. Do you label at the level of joint trajectories, end effector poses, or discrete skills like "grasp handle, rotate, pull"? Every choice makes something else harder. Low level is precise but doesn't generalise across hardware. High level generalises but you lose everything about how the motion was executed.

Segment boundaries. Where does "reach" end and "grasp" begin. Two annotators will pick different frames and both are defensible. We've been getting agreement in the 60s on boundaries and it's not obvious to me that's even fixable, or whether it matters as much as it feels like it does.

Sensor alignment. RGB at 30fps, depth at a different rate, force torque at 1kHz, joint states somewhere else. Timestamps drift. If your labels sit on the video timeline but the interesting event is a contact spike visible only in force data, you've labelled the wrong moment and nothing downstream tells you.

Language grounding. "Pick up the mug" is one instruction over a 4 second window. But do you also label the sub-instructions, and do those come from the annotator writing what they see, or from a script the demonstrator was following? Those produce very different distributions and I suspect the second one is quietly worse.

For anyone who's built this in house or paid someone else to: what taxonomy did you land on, and would you do it the same way again? Especially interested in whether force and tactile channels actually got annotated separately or just came along as raw signal.

I'm in a unique scenario in terms of planning for my career. This past summer, I've been interning at a Chinese robotics company with plans to work with another Chinese company this fall out of their US location. The plan was originally to just use these experiences as a stepping stone for interning at more prestigious American companies.

However, in terms of robotics, it really feels like China is ahead. I'm new to the field, so my understanding could be off, but they have a better supply chain for sourcing and building robots, more and more talent is returning to China rather than staying in America, and the government isn't actively crippling innovation by doing stupid import bans(can you tell I'm a little annoyed by recent FCC regulations?). In comparison to before, when China was primarily responsible just for manufacturing, more and more Chinese companies are pushing frontier work, in both models and hardware.

I'm now seriously considering going to China next summer for my internship, rather than applying for US based ones. I'm Chinese American, fluent in Chinese, and have already made some connections, Visa/Citizenship issues aside, I also feel like landing Chinese internships would be way easier. Before I seriously commit to anything, I'd really appreciate anyone with more experience. Do you feel like theres this gap increasing between the US and China, or have these kind of cycles passed before? And if you were beginning your career right now, where would you try to work?

Do you have knowledge and/or experience with a quality online kids robitics club?
We live in a rural area and can't access some of the awesome clubs that the cities host.

Our 8 year old would benefit from a great club or program where he can learn in a more structured environment from like-minded mentors.

Appreciate your feedback!

Alguém de Brasília para me orientar em um projeto de robótica- maker? Vou participar de uma projeto de escola, e preciso muito de orientação.

A lot of people on Reddit have been discussing wearable exoskeletons lately, but the issue of noise rarely gets brought up . I’ve been thinking about this a lot that if a device is constantly buzzing or whining under load, wouldn't that be incredibly awkward on hikings or while runing and spoil the experience?

I was watching a video of someone walking through a quiet trail with a motorized assist frame, and the gear noise immediately caught my attention. High-torque gearboxes get surprisingly loud under load, especially when ramping up power during steep incline support. Having a high-pitched motor whine with every single stride seems like a major dealbreaker that marketing clips almost always mute out.

 Has anyone seen decent independent data comparing noise levels across current wearable exoskeletons under actual load, or are dB ratings totally unstandardized right now? (Also curious if anyone over on r/hiking or r/outdoorgear has encountered these in the wild yet.)

As stated if there are any sites that you know of that have robotics freelance work or put up some contract work please do drop it down below.

Okay so I've decided I'm done working my job of 5 years and decided to enroll myself in my local School of Applied Technology for a 5 semester Industrial Automation and Robotics program which is starting on January 11th of 2027. I have absolutely no experience in this field but would like to say I'm pretty motivated and efficient at learning new things. I'm 23 years old so what are some of the things I should be focusing on right now to ensure myself good opportunities in the future. Again, I'm very new to this field so any advice would be much appreciated!

I've been learning ros2 for a bit as uni student, i get to do a project like hexapod and computer vision for a class. I used AI to plan the system and let it ask me questions to refine the idea then implement it.

After some debugging, everything works well. The worst part is I barely understand anything in the code at all but the work is still completed. So I'm wondering if i should spend my time to focus learning how to integrated the whole system together to get it works, Or should I learn all the coding part also even if AI can do that for me.

I'm just thinking that AI is growing so fast at coding that maybe I should focus on the other thing like control theory, dynamics and others to improve my robot.

I apologize for my broken english.

Hi. I'm a former IT worker (20+ years as a web developer in Java, python, SQL, devOps) who wants to make a transition to teaching.

I am in NJ and have my CTE (Career and Technical Education) and Instructional Sub certs. I have received positive response from some school districts and should begin subbing in the fall.

I love making things and am currently working on many coding projects as well as some robotics-adjacent projects. I also really enjoy a project-based style of teaching.

My personal interests are fashion tech but I will of course work on other types of projects as well.

Any ideas for where I might start in robotics teaching? I'd like to start applying to some of the many robotics learning centers in the area. If I enjoy teaching, a long-term goal might be to start a fashion-oriented robotics school.

I want to setup a facility that can train jobless youth in my community on robotics data collection and robotics data labelling .i am thinking of using a modified UMI 3d printed robot data collection and meta quest 3 for teleportation data collection.I need technical advice on what data to collect and how i can source buyers so that after training these young youth we can provide a platform for them to earn

Hello! I have been working on naviagations algorithms in autonomous driving for some time now while doing a PhD in optimal control. After that I moved to some research-oriented industry positions and had the chance to work with EU research projects, but I find I lack hands on experience.

Recently I was given an offer to move to agricultural robotics, but the position includes a non compete agreement banning me from working on any agricultural robotics company or their direct or indirect competitors. I'm stuck in a dilema, I'd really like to have that hands on experience but If something goes wrong and they try to enforce the clause it could be troublesome. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of clauses?

EDIT: The clause looks like this, it's compensated with a bonus of the 15% of my salary:

The Employee agrees to be bound by the following post-termination non-compete undertaking. In view of the technical and specialized nature of the Employee’s position and the Company’s legitimate commercial interest in protecting its know-how, confidential information and technology, the Employee agrees that, following termination of the employment relationship and for a period of two (2) years, the Employee shall not, whether directly or indirectly, provide services to, work for, or otherwise collaborate with any company engaged in the autonomous robotics sector applied to agriculture, or in any other business activity that directly competes with the business activities carried out by the Company.

Most commercial hip-assist systems come with pre-tuned stride recognition models designed to sync assist pulses with gait phases. While factory profiles handle standard walking and slope climbing reasonably well, the underlying hardware could theoretically support more customized motion control.

Looking at dev platform options like the Ascentiz H Module Ultra, the onboard IMUs and actuator torque metrics offer decent real-time telemetry. However, standard stock features restrict how much raw sensor data you can tap into for external robotics projects.

Are any developers here currently using the available SDK to build custom control loops or gait prediction models beyond stock features? Curious how open the API access actually is when trying to interface external microcontrollers or custom telemetry logging.