23
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Proposal: Robotics research

As an electrical engineer, I have played with robots, and I can help a lot of people who have simple robotic questions revolving around electronics, which are widely used in robotics.

However, I'm not an expert in kinematics equations, computer vision as applied to robot specific tasks, etc.

The "and robots" was tacked onto the end of the electronics proposal primarily to make sure people understood that they accepted some robotic discussion, however, the experts there are not the experts a true, niche robotics site should have.

Please consider supporting this proposal as a means to provide higher level, and especially non-electronic related, robotics discussion.

The two fields are related, but distinct, and while many experts in either group are experts in the other, most experts in one are not experts/professionals in the other.

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    As another (former) electrical engineer I have to agree - our profession supposedly comprises the experts for E&R, yet at no point are we ever taught anything about robotics unless we just so happen to have had a lot of professional experience in that field. A lot of robotics isn't actually electronics at all.
    – Aaronaught
    Mar 4, 2011 at 17:23
  • Thanks a lot Adam Davis for supporting the proposal. Could you and Aaronaught forward share the proposal link via your social networks? We need 50 more followers for this to take off as of today.
    – hAcKnRoCk
    Mar 7, 2011 at 10:25
  • I do agree that Robotics should be separate from Electronics and Robotics, but isn't this duplicating some of the functionality of the new askbot based ROS Answers? I know that not at Robotics questions are ROS questions, but it is already a thriving community of roboticists of all levels.
    – mjcarroll
    Mar 9, 2011 at 21:24

3 Answers 3

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Based on the feedback here and on the site formerly known as "Electronics and Robotics" regarding robotics being out of scope for that site and deserving of its own site, that site has been renamed to "Electronics".

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Robotics is fundamentally 3 fields of knowledge. Electronics, Software and Mechanics. I don’t mean any disrespect anybody BUT grouping robotics under electronics is totality ignorant on the nature of what makes a robot.

I know many ppl that are experts in one of these fields, some that are expert in 2 and very few that are expert in all 3. Having a community of ppl that respect the others expertise will greatly advance the filed. If the servo expert and the circuit designer can get together whit the AI…. Now you’re in business.

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  • The specialization goes even further. People in industrial robotics don't want anything from people in mobile robotics and AI (I guess they like to be old fashioned and would rather be poor than not having their contributions last forever).
    – Roger F. Gay
    Oct 5, 2011 at 15:26
  • And even within "software" we can branch out quite a bit. The natural world (or researchers and developers) breaks out into another two different cultures whether you're talking about basic control software verses machine learning and higher level logic.
    – Roger F. Gay
    Oct 5, 2011 at 15:27
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I totally agree with Fortunato

At the beginning Computer was considered as part of Electrical engineering. After the great advancement in the Computer field, it was identified as a separate field called Computer engineering. When more advancements and concepts were introduced the Computer science domain was created.

This means that separating Robotics from Electronics is a natural step when the Robotics domain becomes mature enough to hold its unique name in the scientific community.

When we consider what Fortunato had said, we can say that Robotics is a collection of different domains which are sharing common points and they have to cooperate together under a unique identity which is called "Robotics"

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