Advice for father of child interested in robotic engineering and mechatronics

Hi All, hoping I'm asking this in the right place.

My daughter (17) is interested in going into robotics. She is currently studying A-Level/IB in Maths, Physics, Comp Sci and Chemistry.

We went to an engineering firm Curtis-Wrightt in the UK for a careers day and she was taken aback by how different it was to what she imagined. She wants to go to one day work for a company that specialises in the design and manufacture of robots. In my head that means R2D2 or Gundam. She is now unsure if such jobs exist. Can anyone give any guidance please.

She plans to start studying a degree in mechatronics and robotics. Any help appreciated. Thank you.

Quote from SkyeFire

Well, "Robots" covers an awfully broad field. CNC machines and 3D printers count as robots, by some measures. The most common robots in industrial use are "articulated robot arms", which you'll see most often in automotive factories, but are increasingly common in other industries. "Cobots", or Collaborative Robots, are an offshoot of industrial robot arms, that are designed to be safe (mostly) for people to work with directly without fencing.

Then there's "Autonomous Mobile Robots", or AMRs, which are basically wheeled or tracked vehicles that move around a facility doing various tasks, from acting as forklifts to carrying a robot arm on top of it. AMRs are big in automated warehousing.

There's also the robot vacuums for residential use, that everyone's seen. Or their bigger cousins, that roam the aisles of shops checking the status of shelves and alerting humans to low-stock situations.

Disney-style animatronics is another branch of mechatronics. If you look up the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios on YouTube, those seats are actually mounted on large industrial robot arms that ride a track through the building. At least one European military bought the same robot, with a wraparound video screen, to create a flight simulator for training helicopter pilots.

Motorized prosthetic limbs aren't "robotic", but are definitely mechatronic, and there's a lot of skills overlap.

Then there's various newcomers like Boston Dynamics with their robot "dogs", or humanoid robots like the Asimo, ATLAS, or Tesla's "Optimus." That's more of the startup and R&D end of the industry.

So there's a lot of variety for her to choose from, depending on what are she wants to specialize in.

There's also the question of whether she wants to create robots, or robot systems. What I mean is, I've seen the very same robot from KUKA or ABB used in automotive welding, or running deep-fryers in fast-food restaurants, or as medical devices (Google "CyberKnife" for one big example -- that's a basically stock KUKA robot, with lots of plastic to make it look more "medical").

So, if she were to work for one of the big robot companies, like KUKA, she might work on a limited variety of robots, but be technical support for end users trying to use those robots in variously exotic tasks (and lots of mundane tasks). Or, if she worked for a "system integrator", she might work with a more broad variety of robot brands, across a wider variety of applications, and be more involved with non-robot tasks. For example, as a robot integrator, I've picked up basics in welding, pneumatics, machine vision, and other technologies that I had to understand well enough to integrate with my robots. As such, I have an experience base a mile wide but an inch deep -- my "specialty" is finding ways to make different technologies work with each other, when they were never intended to.

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Thanks SkyeFire

You've opened up our horizons. Lots to get on with now.

Really appreciate the time you took in sharing your knowledge. Many thanks!