You have a CS PhD? I highly doubt you can learn something there. If it is about knowledge, find out what books are used in the masters. With a PhD you must be able to learn yourself
Robotics is very different from CS. At CMU robotics is huge and consists of thousands of researchers, with dozens of classes a MS student would have never encountered during their CS PhD or undergrad. It's true you can learn robotics from books, but CMU or any grad program has access to robotics hardware resources you can't find online or in the library. For example I took a course there that had the Aldebaran Nao as a platform. The course has a dozen of them, at the time they were worth $20k a piece.
About the theory, you can learn yourself (I think) about practice, well, you may learn 1 or 2 platforms, but not all. If you get a job, you will for sure have to learn a lot from the platform they use, but much more of the application they do. Also the platforms get obsolete fast…
What about buy 2nd hand/use/resell some hardware? I do not know how much cost a Ms in CMU, but sure does bot even compare to 20k.
Sorry maybe I’m a little bit negative, but if you have already one good title, that is more than enough. The problem is I fully subscribe to Stallone[0]
That’s $20k for one robot. If you want exposure to the breadth of hardware a ME at CMU would bring, you’d need access to the facilities as well. Robotics takes space most people don’t have.