[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by Gui Cavalcanti

My faculty advisor at Olin used to be the vice president of engineering at iRobot, and he told me that iRobot's had around 40 job openings go unfilled for the past year or two, simply because of a lack of skilled roboticists.

Part of the reason also has to do with the fact that they dont hire people directly out of college. I'll have about 1.5 years of work experience but I don't think that would be enough to get the job right out of college.

I'll stop rambling on now, and just submit this plea: please, be roboticists! I know it's really hard learning everything at once, which is why many teams default to just working on the mechanical structure of their robots. I promise you though - if you make the extra studying and programming effort early on, if you learn your sensors well, and if you take the time to research PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control loops, higher and lower brain functionalities, and even a little SLAM (simultaneous-localization-and-mapping), your robot will balance on its two rear wheels and thank you at the end of the season. More importantly, if you pick up enough along the way, you can go to any college you want, and any corresponding career.

The problem is that programming a robot does not involve just knowing how to program. Once you know how to program you have the problem of figuring out how to program a robot which is another annoying can of worms because there are many different ways to do so.