Whether or not your childhood was filled with Legos and living your best robotics team life, this specific engineering field has a lot to offer for cleared candidates. But what does the job really entail?
Living the Robotics Engineer Life
In short, if you step into the robotics engineer shoes, you become responsible for creating and designing robots or robotic systems. Or for some, daily work involves designing machines or processes that assemble the robots. And, depending on the complexity of the robot or the system, you may get to work on multiple robots throughout your career.
Of course, the role of the robotics engineer doesn’t finish after the development stage. The device requires technical support, as well as constant analysis and evaluation that looks for ways to improve. The field of robotics continues to explode. Once achievements are made, new goals are set.
The aerospace and defense industry is always on the lookout to recruit candidates in this field. Whether the DoD needs drones in the air or water, robotics engineers are at the heart of key technological innovation.
What Does it Take to Become a Cleared Robotics Engineer?
So what does it take to be a robotics engineer? You’ll need to have a heart for research and development (R&D) as well as the technical capabilities in Robot Operating System (ROS), Linux, C++, Python, as well as sensing and navigation software. Undergraduate and graduate degrees in demand for robotics are Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or other Aerospace and Robotics-related fields.
And of course, in order to support national security with your robotics engineering skills, you will need to be subjected to a security investigation and be able to meet security clearance eligibility requirements in order to have access to classified information.
Small and large contractors alike are actively recruiting for robotics engineers – especially with the space frontier, but keep your eye out for spots at Booz Allen, Northrop Grumman, or Raytheon. So, whether coding or algorithm development is your vibe, the world of robotics has a place for you.