With generative AI getting plenty of buzz these days, skills in robotics are still in demand as well. You’ll find robots on hospital floors, in retail stores, preparing food in the restaurant industry, and opening boxes in warehouses.
Companies like Badger Technologies make robots for retail businesses like supermarkets to spot a wet floor as well as empty shelves and price discrepancies. Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics’ robot Spot works factory floors, construction sites and research labs to spot hazardous situations and provide insights into operations.
“Anything that is repetitive lends itself well to robotics,” said Gaudy Jandron, CIO of US Signal, a provider of cloud solutions, network connectivity, and data center services.
Although studying software, electrical and mechanical engineering are at the heart of a career in robotics, you will also need soft skills as well, experts say.
“Professionally, even as a software engineer or electrical engineer, it’s helpful to understand principles of mechanics like backlash, stiffness or friction, but you don’t need to be a mechanical designer to develop software or electronics for our robots,” said Joshua Geating, a senior staff mechanical engineer on the Atlas team at Boston Dynamics, in a blog post.
In addition to mechanical and engineering, you will need communication and problem-solving skills in robotics, according to Jandron: “You need to be able to understand the problem you're trying to solve, and to understand the problem the robot is looking to solve, you have to be able to have conversations with business stakeholders and users.”
Other key skills in robotics include process mapping and wireframing. Pick a school or training program that is making significant investments in its labs to provide hands-on experience, Jandron advised. Training in robotics should involve apprenticeships, she added.
For tech professionals looking to get into robotics, expect to work on-site, even if you became accustomed to working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jandron suggested: “I think it's a high-touch and highly collaborative field that you're going to have to get into.”
Explore Robotic Process Automation
In addition to the hardware aspects or robotics, consider training for robotic process automation (RPA), a form of software robotics that IBM says automates back-office tasks of workers.
For RPA, learn programming languages like Python and C++. Also prepare for RPA by learning business analytics skills.
Developing a career in RPA entails “being able to take what you're learning about the business, and about the problem you're looking to solve and then being able to translate that into technical requirements and actual code that is going to deliver RPA,” Jandron said.
Adding Generative AI to Robotics Training
For years, people looking to get into robotics needed skills such as programming, prompt engineering, algorithms and coding. Now mundane tasks have a copilot that helps them generate code, explained Dor Skuler, cofounder and CEO of Intuition Robotics, which makes an AI companion social robot called ElliQ.
You no longer need to write basic code around a feature or function, Skuler said.
Study Multiple Disciplines
When preparing for a career in robotics, tech professionals should study multiple disciplines such as coding, data science, algorithms and behavioral psychology. In addition, key skills in robotics include computer vision and natural language processing.
For robots that clean the floor, you might need an understanding of the chemistry of tiles, detergents and water and feeding that into algorithms. Meanwhile, for robots like ElliQ that serve as a companion, tech professionals may want to study psychology in addition to learning about hardware, sensors, computer vision and NLP, according to Skuler.
Learning the Boundaries of Robotics and Gen AI
With any discussion of robotics comes concerns about taking jobs away of tech professionals. Part of the preparation involves learning where it makes sense to have human intervention when working with robotics and automation. For example, in healthcare, patient safety is a key factor in whether it is appropriate to use robotics, Jandron explained.
“Robots are not going to use a heart to make a decision,” Jandron said. “It’s very programmatic; it’s very logical.”
Robots could be used to escort customers to their cages in data centers, but tech professionals should think about whether that is the type of experience they want without the human touch. “There's always a human being that interacts with the customer, and they might need a cart. They might need a monitor,” Jandron said. “And so there's that human interaction and some of the developments that I'm seeing in the data center space as it relates to robotics is leveraging robots to do some of those escorts, or some of the checks that human beings currently do.”
As the tech industry ramps up regulation of robotics, tech professionals should study use cases on where robotics and generative AI should be applied, according to Jandron. Knowledge of ethics and governance will be essential.
“Ethics and the governance case become really important because we don't typically think of that in the forefront,” Jandron said. “It's always an afterthought.” Consider a business administration degree and take courses that address ethics and compliance, governance and regulations.
