Quote:
Originally Posted by squirrel
Probably not, but there are engineering jobs designing trains...I think that was his point. You can get a job making really neat, big things that are not robots...they are even more amazing
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I'd like to second this comment. I work in the area of industrial automation and the systems that make things, or move things, or monitor things use the same skills as you need to build an FRC Robot. And are usually at least as cool and extremely sophisticated (but they're not always built in 6 weeks).
Most of them don't have wheels. And it's usually not just one robot, but many working together.
How about this
VW Plant. Order your car, and watch it being finished.
Another example, have you ever wondered what happens after you click the "buy" on a website. They guaranteed that if you ordered by 4pm it would ship the same day - that's not a trivial problem. The warehouse is just a huge robot thousands of square feet in size. It has to decide where your items are in the warehouse, how best to get them on a conveyor (often a mile or more long) and into one spot where they all end up in a box addressed to you. If you think finding a basketball target is difficult, imagine scheduling thousands of "picks", efficiently and without any errors. (There are "human" players too - you have to make their lives easy if you want to limit errors and keep them as employees).
Oh, you mentioned competitive. Get the order wrong and you either have to pay to fix the problem, and/or you loose the customer.
This
video of how FedEx works is aimed at a younger age group, but still gives a good overview. There a thousands of PLCs (the equivalent of a cRIO) controlling every aspect of the operation, and they're all talking to progressively larger system so that FedEx knows where every package is all the time.
AND the whole sort has to occur between about midnight, when the planes arrive and 5am when the airports revert to passenger traffic. Miss a sort, and you have to refund all the next-day packages (millions of dollars), and have your customers consider UPS next time.
A small cog in a large wheel, the machine that dispense fuses is automated to the point where it will automatically re-order when the stock gets low - a fuse dispensing robot, although it always stays bolted to the floor. Loosing millions of dollars because you don't have a fuse is not an option - did you think of that when you designed the system?
Manufacturing is what generates wealth. Nothing else does. Moving money on Wall Street is just imaginary. You have to create something, cars, trains, electronics, washing machines (not a trivial control problem), widgets of any kind - taking raw materials and making something useful from them.
Manufacturing in the US seems to be undervalued. Witness the politician being eager to bail out the banks, but not so keen to help the auto industry.
It's manufacturing that provides good jobs. To be successful we need to manufacture in the US, not import everything and for that to be successful needs automation - robots. And who better to provide those than FRC alumni?