[superb-owl]

I was super excited to take a robotics class in college. I'd fallen in love with programming and was excited to take all that magic into the real world.

We all had to buy roombas to program. The final exam was getting it to traverse a maze. It seemed so simple! They even gave us the exact dimensions and layout ahead of time. Just hard-code the path, right? Spin the wheels so many rotations, turn 90 degrees, spin some more.

Except the real world is messy, and tiny errors add up quickly. One of the wheels hits a bump, or slips a little on the tile, and suddenly you're way off course. Without some kind of feedback loop to self-correct, everything falls apart.

My excitement for robotics died quickly. I much prefer the perfectly constrained environment of a CPU.

[lukan]

Oh yes, we were building and programming Lego Mindstorm robots in university. Also with the goal to go through a simple maze and follow a line. Booring simple everyone thought. But the thirst thing we learned, was to not trust our sensors. My expectation was, if the ultrasonic sensor said, there is 1 m to an obstacle, then there is 1 m of free space. Well, not really. Partly because the sensors were really bad and only worked reliable when the obstacle was in a 90 degree angle, partly it is in the nature of sensors to not be perfect.

I am still excited for robots though, but haven't worked on one in quite a while.

[defrost]

Forty years in university (while I resided in a residential college) I was also excited to work on robotics.

We were expected to assist in machining parts, building control libraries from scratch, working out algorithms from scratch for path generation, etc.

The goal was to shear a sheep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM