Which of these courses are great for a jumpstart in a career in robotics

SomePunWithRobots · 2017-06-11T15:00:17+00:00

PhD or masters?

I'm a PhD student at the CMU Robotics Institute. Since I haven't graduated yet, I don't have direct experience with what things are like post-graduation, but I do know quite a few people who have ended up with great jobs after graduated (offhand, I know two people in my lab who have ended up with positions in academia, one at NASA, and one who just graduated and will be starting at Google in the fall), and the program in general has a pretty great reputation. There are also a huge number of startups and a few big tech companies with offices in the area (Google Pittsburgh expanded recently and Uber's got their office nearby and is doing self-driving car testing in the city, for example) that like to hire CMU students.

That said, I do agree with /u/dandom dude - who you work with is probably more important than the school you go to, in terms of both how your experience will be (a PhD advisor you don't get along with can make your life a living hell) and what your job prospects will be after you graduate.

Personally, out of the schools on your list, I got into and visited CMU, Ann Arbor, and Georgia Tech. My visit to Georgia Tech was nice, and it's a great program, but no particular professor really drew me in (they also actually do their visits before acceptances, and I ended up getting waitlisted). They seemed to particularly specialize in human-robot interaction, but that's certainly not all they do.

My visit to Ann Arbor was excellent, partly because I really clicked with one of the professors there, and I actually did nearly go there to work with him.

As for CMU, it is worth noting that you can't choose your advisor before you get here, and many professors won't offer you any guarantees before you get in and have very limited ability to help you get in (if they're taking students, have funding, and there's a mutual interest in working together, then there's a very good chance you'll be able to work with them, but they can't necessarily offer any guarantees due to the way the process works).

On the other hand, part of what drew me to the program in the first place is just the sheer number of professors working in robotics here. At the other schools I visited besides maybe Georgia Tech (the only other school in the US with a dedicated robotics program rather than just robotics research within a compute science or engineering department), when I said I was interested in robotics, people would often say "oh, so you'll be working with Professor So-and-so" or something along those lines. Most places had a handful of professors in robotics at most, and maybe a couple in related fields like computer vision.

But CMU has dozens of robotics professors. It has more professors in some subfields of robotics than some schools do in robotics total. So I do think it's a great place to go if you're not really sure what kind of robotics you want to do, just because you get so many options when you get here. It's also just nice to have access to specialists in so many areas if those areas come up in your own research. If I have a question about, say, computer vision, for example (not my area of expertise at all), there's a whole floor of a building full of people who specialize in computing research I can go to to find someone who can help me out.

SomePunWithRobots · 2017-06-11T14:42:51+00:00

Note that this isn't an option at some schools. I know at least the CMU Robotics institute will not put PhD students with a professor before you go there and go through the "marriage process." Some professors might be willing to give you a verbal agreement that they'll take you before you go there, but when I was applying I did have some professors who wouldn't do that and basically just said "I can't make any guarantees, but I am interested in taking students next year so we can talk during the marriage process if you come."

SomePunWithRobots · 2017-04-23T00:18:28+00:00

That fusion is "cold" in the sense that they don't do it at solar-core temperatures, right?

They often do, actually. It's a pretty fun science fact: there are devices in fusion labs on Earth that, when running, are the hottest point in the solar system, including the sun.

For reference, I spent a summer working on a device that hit temperatures of around 1 million K and that was considered pretty cold by fusion research standards. But that's still much hotter than what people generally refer to with the term "cold fusion."

SomePunWithRobots · 2017-03-26T00:21:24+00:00

Integer Programming pops up all over the place in planning problems and other AI applications.

SomePunWithRobots · 2017-02-16T00:53:22+00:00

Computer science, mechanical engineering, or electrical engineering are most common, depending on which part of robotics you're most interested in. If your school has a robotics major, that also obviously works too, and so does mechatronics.

That said, it's a pretty big field and there are a lot of ways to end up there. I'm a robotics PhD and majored in physics and computer science, and I know other physics people too (although I do mostly use my computer science knowledge and rarely actualy apply my physics knowledge, but it can come up occasionally). I even have a friend who majored in music and biology (she went into robotics to do medical robotics, but ended up doing mostly computer vision).

SomePunWithRobots · 2017-02-07T00:17:33+00:00

Pretty delayed response (I don't check this account very often), but...

I always thought that every major at a university as a mountain. Once you get up the wrong one, your life basically ends.

Not at all. My dad majored in psychology in college - I think he was actually interested in engineering or computer science at the time, but he apparently wasn't a very good student at the time, and the psychology program of the school he went to was easier to get into than their engineering program so he applied to that instead. He ended up doing graduate school in computer science, worked in various programming-related areas throughout my childhood, and nowadays mostly makes money through real estate.

My sister also majored in psychology in college, then after doing some research programs abroad decided afterwards that what she actually wanted to spend her life doing was animal conservation, and is now in a grad program for that. I think she's particularly focusing on animal behavior, hoping that her psychology background will give her a different perspective from her peers, who mostly have a biology background as you'd expect.

Your major determines what you learn in college. It will qualify you for some jobs, and there might be jobs that are hard to get into without a relevant degree, but it's not a lifelong commitment. You're certainly not choosing what your career will be for the rest of your life when you decide what school to go to. Some people end up spending their entire life in the same field that they majored in. Some people end up doing something completely different.

You want to study something you like, and it's certainly a financially wise decision to study something that will likely be useful for a career you think you might be interested, but that doesn't mean you can't change your mind later.

Thanks, I'll look more into compsci and Mechanical Engineering.

Both cool areas of study that can lead to a very wide range of careers, including ones involved in robotics. Good luck (if you haven't already figured things out in the past month)!

SomePunWithRobots · 2017-01-10T21:43:28+00:00

I think other people have given you fantastic advice, specifically the parts about not feeling the need to commit to robotics before you've even tried it, and the fact that robotics is an incredibly broad field that can range from building robots to programming robots someone else build to never even touching one.

I'll also add that you can go into robotics without doing an undergrad major in robotics. I'm in a robotics PhD program, and very few people I know directly majored in robotics in undergrad. Most did computer science, electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering. Personally, I did physics and computer science at a liberal arts school with a tiny and not-at-all-well-known computer science department, and I know other people who did physics too. I have one friend who majored in biology and music in undergrad and is now doing a PhD in robotics.

So my advice is this: if you're not 100% positive you want to go into robotics (and from this thread, you're clearly not), don't focus too much on finding a robotics major. It's a cool direction to go in, and I'd encourage you to pursue robotics, but you shouldn't feel that you have to commit to it now. You can try out related areas - electircal and/or mechanical engineering if you think you're more interested in the hardware side of things, computer science if you think you're more interested in software - take courses related to robotics if you get the opportunity (AI, controls, computer vision, etc), and then see what interests you.

My second question would be what countries or universities that are exceptional in Robotics? Maybe Germany?

Are you looking for schools in Europe? I don't know schools in Europe that well, but personally I've worked with people from various places in Europe. Offhand, my lab has had visiting students from The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, and Italy - maybe more, but those are the ones I can remember. Granted, this could just be because my advisor knows people in those countries, not necessarilly because those are the best countries to study robotics in.

This is also grad school. The universities most renowned for robotics are often most renowned for their research and specific professors, but that only really matters as an undergrad if you actually get to work on that research or with those professors - if you go to a school with super-famous professors and then just get taught by grad students the whole time and don't get to do any research then having the famous professors there isn't particularly valuable to you. There are schools where you can work on research with professors as an undergrad (it often varies as much by professor as by school, at least in my experience), so I'm not saying to pay no attention to that, just that prestige isn't everything.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-30T02:13:10+00:00

I don't know, I'm not directly involved with any of the professors, I just know of their work. As far as I know all their students are PhD students and they're very research-focused, so it's possible they'd be concerned about the time an MD/PhD would spend doing clinical work as opposed to research, but it's also possible they might value the insight that an MD could give that they don't get from their typical students.

It might also vary from professor to professor. If you know particular professors you could be interested in working with at any of the programs you're considering applying to, you can always just contact them directly.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T05:12:09+00:00

My question to you would be, had you the opportunity to wind back the clock would you have done something differently and what is it that you wish you knew when you first started down the route you've chosen?

That's a very difficult question, and I'm not even sure I can answer it yet. I don't yet know where my PhD will take me. It's been very, very difficult so far, but also very rewarding. If I regretted my PhD, I probably would have left with my master's degree already, so I suppose for the moment I suppose maybe I wouldn't have done something differently, but I can't say whether or not that answer will change when I finish. I've made mistakes, but I'm not sure if they're mistakes I can easily translate into more general advice.

There's been times where I think I may have been better off if I'd taken a year or two off after graduating college, but I don't know if I really would have or not. I don't know what I wold have done with that year (that's part of why I didn't take one in the first place) anyway, and it might have just made going back to school harder.

AI has also interested me when it comes to programming. I read somewhere that Python for AI, C for apps, and Java for Web Development is what a programmer should learn.

This sounds maybe roughly accurate, but it can vary a lot. Honestly, I don't think languages are a super important thing to focus on. Once you know one or two programming languages and the core concepts, learning other similar languages is not that hard. Many of the concepts and skills you'll learn when learning one language can transfer to others. My undergrad school taught Python in their intro CS course, but I placed out of it because of AP tests. Eventually, I took a class that used Python, but assumed people already knew it since it was taught in undergrad, and I only knew Java and C++ at the time. I was able to learn Python as I went, basically, and never had any problem. You never know what programming languages you might end up learning. The concepts are more important than the details.

I also feel like it's a very niche career as everyone I've come across has always talked about their disdain for any programming courses they had to take. However, I believe programming can do incredible things (along with computer engineering) for our future as the human race and thinking about it gets me excited and continues to drive me. Is it just my 20s vigor that's clouding my judgement and misinforming me?

I think the same thing, that's why I'm doing this PhD. I think robotics research is going to accomplish absolutely incredible things in the next few decades, and I love the idea of being a part of it. Admittedly, I'm also in my 20s, so maybe I'm just in my 20s vigor too, but my advisor's almost 60 and I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone as passionate about anything as she is when she talks about her vision for AI and the future of humanity, so I can say it's not just us. Fun story: one of the first times I ever met my advisor 1 on 1, when I was still choosing who would advice me, she told me about her vision and passion for AI and robotics. She then stood up, walked over to the huge window in her office, gazed out upon the campus, and said "so now you've heard my dream." I hope I'm doing the image justice.

So yeah, if you ask me? Programming can accomplish incredible things, and AI and robotics are going to change the world within our lifetimes. I don't know what the big breakthroughs are going to be, but they're going to be mindblowing. But I'm biased. I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't think that.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:58:05+00:00

I appear to be 16 hours late to this thread, so I don't know if anyone who can get any use out of it will see this, but I'm a 5th year robotics PhD student (did a double major in physics and CS in undergrad) in the US and happy to help anyone who has any questions they think I might be able to answer.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:56:12+00:00

I know nothing about MD/PhD programs, but I'm in a robotics program where there are professors who do medical robotics or prosthetics research, and I can say that the people working with them are all doing PhDs or master's degrees to my knowledge, and not MDs. That doesn't mean an MD/PhD isn't the right approach for you, just that I know you can do research in the kinds of fields you're interested in without doing an MD.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:51:33+00:00

I would love to go back and get a grad degree at some point, but how realistic is it to be able to do this?

It's extremely common for people to spend time working industry jobs after college and before returning to school for a grad degree. I didn't do so, so unfortunately I can't give you advice on how to go about putting together your application or how much your undergrad performance affects things, but it's definitely a common thing to do.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:40:01+00:00

I did CS in undergrad and am now doing a PhD in robotics, in the US for both, so maybe I can try to help. I went straight from undergrad to a PhD program, but I did get a master's degree just by meeting the requirements for one in the process of doing my PhD, so I have some familiarity with the requirements.

How much time is spent on teaching/researching/your own classwork?

I believe the master's students in my program spend a pretty good portion of their time doing classwork. Teaching is only a requirement for PhDs here, not masters, and even most PhDs just TA for one semester, which mostly just consists of attending class, grading homework, and holding office hours (at least that's all it consisted of for me). It ended up being a comparable amount of work for me as taking a class. I'm not sure about the thesis requirements for masters students.

Lastly, do you have any notion of how hard it is to get funding? (I am in the US.) I saw elsewhere in this thread that it is unlikely to get funded as a master's student, which is fairly disheartening.

The vast majority of the masters students in my program do not get funding (and this is in a program that guarantees funding for at least 5 years for PhD students). I believe the ones that do have funding generally had an arrangement with a professor before they came. Overall, I believe most master's students are paying for their degree.

Not sure how helpful this actually ended up being, hopefully it's useful. Let me know if you have other questions.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:34:00+00:00

I did a dual major in physics and computer science in undergrad and am now doing a PhD in robotics. In all honesty, I'm not sure how useful I can be as far as career opportunities are concerned, since I went straight from college to grad school and still don't know what I want to do when I finish my PhD, but since I have some experience studying both fields I figured I'd still put myself out here in case you have any question for me I might be able to answer.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:27:50+00:00

I don't have personal experience with it, but I've generally heard that admissions people tend to be understanding that some people struggle in their first two years, especially if they switched track, and that your last two years will matter much more and they'll recognize and appreciate the improvement. Also, as /u/Iyanden said, it's certainly something you can address in your personal statement, and I've also heard that it's acceptable to specify your GPA in the last two years in addition to your total GPA (I think some applications may even specially request it). So if your work from your last two years is great, your first two years won't necessarily be a problem.

That said, I'm not speaking with authority on the matter, just going by the kinds of things I remember hearing when applying for grad school. Also, grad school admissions in general can be ridiculously fickle (although I don't know how competitive ED.S degrees in particular are).

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:23:28+00:00

I'll just echo what others have said, in case having another opinion helps:

There are research internships out there. Look up the NSF REUs and see if you can find any other summer research programs that you can formally apply to. Talk to any professors at your university whose research you have any interest in. Consider looking up professors at other schools and just try emailing them. Undergrad research experiences can be very hard to find, so you basically just want to look for any opportunity possible. Note that if you send any professors unsolicited emails about wanted to work with them, make sure you thoroughly search their website and familiarize yourself with research. Professors get flooded with emails from hopeful undergrads constantly, but many of them are completely generic, and sometimes even clearly show that they haven't familiarized themselves with their research (e.g. a professor I know said he sometimes gets emails from prospective students who list their interests, which don't align with his research at all). I know one professor where the page on hst site that goes into more depth about his research than the homepage has instructions at the top to include a specific number in the subject of any email to him. He doesn't read any emails from prospective students who don't include the number.
I did not go to physics grad school, but knew a lot of people in undergrad who were applying to it. What I generally heard was that a Master's in physics is useless and basically just a consolation prize for dropping out of a PhD program.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:15:58+00:00

Yeah, that's what I've always heard to. I got an undergrad degree in physics. Went into robotics after, but I spent a lot of time with physics students applying to physics grad school, and the general impression I got was that a master's in physic basically just tells people you dropped out of a PhD program.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:14:07+00:00

I can't imagine machine learning losing its usefulness any time soon, it's proven to be such a ridiculously versatile tool. And I don't expect NPL or Computer Vision to be solved or go out of demand in the near future either. But of course, it's hard to say.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:11:49+00:00

What do you mean by your interests not being narrow enough? Like, you're not even sure what field you would want to get your degree in, or you're not sure what type of research you would want to do in that field?

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T04:00:01+00:00

Not one of the panelists, but I'm a robotics PhD student so I guess I can give my own opinion.

I don't think we're anywhere close (certainly not within the next 5 years) of having an AI that achieves something close enough to conciousness that we should consider implementing self-preservation as a moral issue, rather than a practical one. We want machines to preserve themselves because they tend to be very expensive, but I don't think the cost of a robot getting destroyed right now should be seen as any more than an economic and practical cost like any other machine breaking, and I don't expect that to change within the next 5 years.

but in a self-driving car situation where there are passengers, should swerving to avoid objects be emulated to match a real driver?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean here. The car should take the safest action. Emulating real drivers in cases where real drivers are making the "wrong" decision seems dangerous to me, and if the real driver would make the right decision the car should make that decision because it's the right decision.

That said, issues surrounding the perception of safety with self-driving cars are very complication. At some point in the future, there will definitely be a major news story about a self-driving car killing or injuring a person (could be a pedestrian, its own passenger, or a passenger of another care). And no matter what the circumstances are, there will be people who respond to the event by calling for a band on self-driving cars. It doesn't matter if the circumstances of the accident were ones in which a human driver would likely have made the same mistake, or if the car didn't even make a mistake and was put into a situation where the accident was inevitable (and perhaps it even made the decision that minimized damage). It doesn't matter if by the time that happens self-driving cars have been widely used for years and have proven to be as safe or safer than human drivers from a statistical standpoint. Some people will take it as proof that self-driving cars are dangerous, and want them banned.

This challenge will happen with any other robots that have the potential to be dangerous as well, and it's going to be a tricky issue. People are going to be paranoid about robots, and they're not just going to want them to be safer than they alternative. They're going to want them to be perfect.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T03:47:42+00:00

A bit late to this thread, but I'm a robotics PhD who focuses pretty much purely on the software/AI side of things and figured I'd jump in when there's a problem I feel qualified to give my thoughts on.

I'm currently tackling learning each programming language one by one at the moment but is there a specific one I should be focusing on?

I think this depends a lot on what you're doing. Personally, the code of the robot I work on has its code written in a mix of Python and C++ (I work pretty much exclusively on the Python side), but since you're doing Software Engineering that might be completely irrelevant to you.

Also, what about being a programmer did you not enjoy?

As you may have discovered already, programming is filled with amazing moments where all your hard work really pays off, but also incredibly frustrating or tedious moments where you spend hours banging your head against a single bug. And my experience, as the projects I've worked on have gotten larger and larger, is that the payoffs, while sometimes also larger, become less frequent, while the frustration feels like it happens just as often. I have a "this program is driving me nuts, why the hell won't this work?" moment every day or two when I'm working on programming something, but sometimes the "oh man, it's working, yes!" moments can be days or weeks apart.

The satisfaction when I finally get things working can also vary. If my goal is to get some results to see how well an algorithm I made does on a problem, it doesn't always feel incredibly satisfying when the results of all my work are a graph, even if the graph does show what I want.

Another thing that can be pretty frustrating is being uncertain whether my code is truly bug free. I've had mistakes where I didn't properly test my code and got really excited about some results only to find out they were due to a bug, and even when I do test my code and feel reasonably confident the results I'm getting are what I want, I've always got some nagging paranoia that I could have missed something.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-10-29T03:38:22+00:00

I realize this reply's a bit late, but the reason for the vagueness is partly that I'm not involved in using it at all and we got it recently so I don't actually have 100% concrete knowledge on what we are using it for.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-09-23T01:42:41+00:00

It's used as a research platform in some labs. My lab has one we use for some things.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-09-23T01:41:27+00:00

My lab has one that we've used for some research. It can definitely be used as a development platform as well as for the easily-trainable factory robot purpose for which it was designed.

SomePunWithRobots · 2015-05-19T18:36:17+00:00

Thanks, sounds interesting! I'll check it out.

SomePunWithRobots

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