Buy some serial servo motors and program them.

Learn about how to battery-power projects, starting with a microcontroller board and your servo.

Learn power distribution circuitry - wire gauges for given loads, etc.

Learn some useful control/animation bits, e.g. play around with an IK library.

This is more or less what led to my own first robots (a simple walker, then a more ambitious hexapod, etc.)

Recently bought a simple robot (hiwonder puppypi). It’s kind of a mess but armed with something like codex / Claude code it took me couple of days to the get int the rhythm of things. Bu the end of the week I was able to add new features understand the basics of ROS2.

I think it’s solid introduction, learning by doing.

The book "Robot Builder's Bonanza" is a nice introduction and gets you started on the hardware side.

BEAM robots are a stupid-simple way to start. A great project if you just want to follow some instructions and learn to solder, learn circuit components, play with low-power solar, etc.

https://smfr.org/robots/

What is exciting enough for you that you'll be able to sustain your interest? There's a lot of learning.

I'm going to maybe diverge from some advice and say try and start with hardware connected to your laptop. That's how I started way back (during the original IBM-PC era and a Data Acquisition Card from IBM). Learn how sensors, motors and actuators work. If you were near me I'd lend you a kit I have sitting around that I got for my kids but I'm sure there are options to hook up some basic I/O (Analog and digital) to your laptop.

I would decouple the embedded aspect from this for now and really many embedded systems are running "real" large computer systems. You can build a lot on your desk and having a "real" computer will take away some of the additional hassle of dealing with various embedded platforms. Once you gain a better understanding of the components you can always move to some embedded setup.

The Art of Electronics is one book I will recommend. I would say though start with a kit and use AI or Google search to get some basic circuits going.

Buy an Arduino and some hobby servos and tinker with them.

But ideally you would have a goal in mind. what do you want your robot to do? (pass butter?) Once you have a goal then you will be able to focus on just what you need to learn to achieve that goal.

i do robots for work (formerly drones, now self driving cars). pick a type of robot that interests you. self driving rovers, industrial manufacturing machines, drones, humanoids, underwater pipe inspecting subs are all robots with very different technologies underlying them. very hard to just “learn robots” you gotta have something in mind that you think is cool that is the direction you wanna go in, otherwise e.g. you learn inverse kinematics and it’s completely unnecessary for delivery drones, or you learn VLMs and it’s completely unnecessary for industrial robots. start with the goal and then peel back the onion. good luck!

I'm working on an autonomous rover to deliver homebrew to my neighbors. It's a silly idea, but having that mission has resulted in a wild journey for me. I think it's the key to doing something more interesting than someone else's tutorial.

Here's my build blog: https://crawforc3.github.io/blog/rover

Feel free to reach out if you just want to chat.

How I did it: buy a Gen 2 Teddy Ruxpin from eBay, a bench power supply, a soldering kit, and an Arduino, and start tinkering

If you have a child, you should definitely check out FIRST, started by Dean Kamen, who also invented the Segway. For elementary students, FIRST LEGO League uses simple, LEGO-based robotics. In high school, FIRST Robotics has the students building very impressive robots.