
I'm a JavaScript engineer. How can I get into Robotics? - jiert
I&#x27;m growing a bit tired of making browsers do things, and think it would be fun to make robots do things. I&#x27;ve messed around with Arduino, but nothing beyond that. Where should I start?
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thomasrossi
Robotics with capital R comes with mechanics, algebra and control theory, my
flatmate was building robots. They are super expensive though. I think an
arrival point to go to "career" could be to stabilize a body standing still on
top of a sphere or over two wheels.

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jiert
Yeah, the level of math required is a concern career-wise.

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atroyn
If you want to get serious/make a career of it, there's no getting around the
math. Even an embedded controls engineer needs to understand signals and
timing.

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lostdog
Lots of drone companies need frontend engineers. Check out their job postings.

Here's an example:
[https://boards.greenhouse.io/kespryinc/jobs/50151](https://boards.greenhouse.io/kespryinc/jobs/50151)

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bfrog
What you do really depends on what focus area you want to start diving in to.
Try making a simple drone fly around for awhile automatically, you will learn
all sorts of nifty things about control theory, mechanical models, digital
signal processing, machine learning, telemetry and more.

Robotics as a field is quite large. There's all sorts of Robotics out there
really.

JavaScript probably isn't the language of choice for Robotics though... C/C++
most definitely are a lot more widely used considering you want low latency
with hard time limit control loops. Imagine if your robotics software suddenly
decided it needed to garbage collect or JIT some code when it should've been
making a decision to avoid collisions...

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jiert
Thanks for the advice. Do you have any suggestions on a drone platform that
would be good for a beginner?

I notice that the first thing that pops up on google for 'programming drones'
is [http://www.nodecopter.com/](http://www.nodecopter.com/) which seems right
up my alley, but I think you have a good point about learning C/C++

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fagunb
I am wondering why no body mentioned Espruino -
[http://www.espruino.com/](http://www.espruino.com/) \- do check it out

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thethinker1032
This may be what you are looking for:
[http://cylonjs.com/](http://cylonjs.com/)

It's a javascript framework for robotics.

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CindyPtn
Another good place to start would be OpenCV, a library for computer vision.
It'll come in handy if you wish to build robots that are aware of their
environment.

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johnmw
Have you seen [http://nodebots.io](http://nodebots.io) ? Might be a good place
to start for a JS engineer.

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jiert
Cool, thanks!

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Qworg
Do you want to do it as a career or just to play with?

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jiert
I'd like to play with it at first but with the goal of someday making it a
career.

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Qworg
I'd take Thrun's course on autonomous robots.

I'd then implement it on a physical system - I'd focus on something other than
Arduino, which doesn't translate well, and do it on RaspPi or similar.

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atroyn
Do you have a CS or other engineering degree? I'm going back for my masters in
Robotics after 5 years in making browsers do things.

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mdonahoe
How about doing web stuff at a robotics company?

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jiert
A very good idea. I mean, that's probably the best way to get a foot in the
door.

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mattkrea
Pick a framework and order some devices / components. I was attempting to get
into this but never got beyond toying around with GPIO on the Beaglebone. You
just have to start getting the equipment and dive into it.

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jiert
Thanks. Yeah I bought an Arduino and some parts, but never got past the first
bug robot build.

I'm also wondering where people interested in this stuff gather, and where
some of the better tutorials / blogs / books are.

You're right though, I need to just start putting parts together.

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forkLding
Try tessel.io, although you're going to have to know some node.Js basics

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jiert
I appreciate everyone's comments, thanks!!

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nso95
LEGO Mindstorms

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touristtam
Or arduino? There are project based around NodeJS to communicate with arduino
board (see [https://github.com/voodootikigod/node-
serialport](https://github.com/voodootikigod/node-serialport))

