[dimatura]

Simulation is definitely an important and useful tool.

That said, to me the real beauty of robotics is seeing a physical machine that you put together and wrote the code for move around on its own accord.

It's definitely harder to get started this way than with simulators, but it's now easier than ever. And you'll learn all sorts of things that never come up in simulated environments. Something like the nvidia jetbot (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...) is easy enough to get started without much fuss and thanks to the onboard camera and GPU, can get you pretty far in implementing advanced deep learning-based algorithms.

(That said, the default camera isn't that great, which you can consider either part of the fun, or just making your life unnecessarily harder. I would consider adding something like a realsense D435i to get IMU+depth for state estimation).