Background: Started in industrial automation (lots of Fanuc, Yaskawa, Omron, etc.), built a lot of cool systems with cool people that made things with robots. Pivoted to "general" robotics in grad school. Been spending the last 5+ years making "general" robots.
I think the best thing for learning robotics looks pretty similar to learning a programming language: Have a specific task in mind that the robot/programming language will help you solve. Even if its just a pick-and-place and a camera, or a shaker table with a camera over top, or a garden watering timer/relay combo. Just work on something specific with your toy robot and you'll naturally encounter much of the difficult things about robotics (spatial manipulation, control, timing, perception, drivers (GODDAMN DRIVERS), data, you name it).
Going right to a high-DOF arm or trained LLM is always cool, but the person who hacks together a camera/relay/antenna to automate some gardening task or throws some servos and slides together to make a Foosball robot is doing the most interesting things, in my opinion.
I think the best thing for learning robotics looks pretty similar to learning a programming language: Have a specific task in mind that the robot/programming language will help you solve. Even if its just a pick-and-place and a camera, or a shaker table with a camera over top, or a garden watering timer/relay combo. Just work on something specific with your toy robot and you'll naturally encounter much of the difficult things about robotics (spatial manipulation, control, timing, perception, drivers (GODDAMN DRIVERS), data, you name it).
Going right to a high-DOF arm or trained LLM is always cool, but the person who hacks together a camera/relay/antenna to automate some gardening task or throws some servos and slides together to make a Foosball robot is doing the most interesting things, in my opinion.