With my kids we did Le Robot from hugging face over the Christmas break, it was a fun project to put together the kit and get the follower arm to follow the leader. You can also train ML models with it etc https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/en/so101

First: Get a 3d printer, if you don't have one. No quicker way to turn ideas into physical objects for prototyping and iteration.

Second: Pick a project with modest but not trivial goal. Something that exists within the state of the art on at least most axes. e.g. make a quadcopter, make a 3d printer, or make an automated cat food dispenser. The project can be special on an axis, e.g. I want the break the drone speed record, or make the best battle bot for a weight class - but stacking too many novelties into a project compounds the difficulty.

Three: Break down the project into manageable sub tasks, starting simple then working towards integration. E.g. step 1, make a drone motor spin. Step 2, make a drone motor spin at exactly 2503rpm. Step 3, design a housing to fit four drone motors/control board/battery, etc. It's perfectly natural/common/fun to play this by ear, many projects will go back and forth between biting off more than you can chew and isolating model systems for testing.

Four: Integrate the subsystems, test, debug and most importantly repeat.

[0] The Bambu a1 mini is a perfectly competent entry-level product. And Fusion360 is a solid CAD for design side.

Start with a simple analog Braitenberg vehicle and learn how to ascribe intelligent behaviour to a purely mechanical system.

>How did you started on your journey with robotics?

Building RC cars, RC quads, 3D FDM printers, and LinuxCNC/EMC 3-axis mill retrofits.

>what's handy to learn in the first place?

Depends on your learning goals, and desired platform budget.

1. Some sort of basic EE topics in a school, or Ham technician license

2. Basic project book on Arduino: blink LED, move RC servo, spin motor, and make speaker beeps etc.

3. Build cheap Arduino turtle bot kit, racing drone, and or a RC car kit

4. Build a 3D printer kit like LDOmotors voron, or join a local space to get CAD/printing skills

5. ROS tutorial to connect Arduino turtle bot kit to simulated environment

6. Courses on Forward Kinematics, Inverse Kinematics, OpenCV Machine Vision, POMDP, NN, Kalman filter, and PID motor control.

7. Build a small 7-axis robot arm path planner in ROS simulator

8. Build a Autonomous mobile Robot with your SLAM of choice, and bolt arm to turtle/tracked platform

9. Gain the wisdom of the tribe around guidance and navigation problems

10. Build some sort of walker: Heaxapod (easy), quad (challenging), and biped (hard)

11. Remember to test everything outside in sun, wind, and rain. There is a lot of expensive garbage products that only sort-of work in ideal circumstances.

Again, the path may be greatly simplified if your goal is only to use robotic platforms... rather than build something expensive. For example, the Yarbo core platform looks like a fun mid-sized project to retrofit, and defunct units are under $1.5k off auction sites.

Have fun =3

These hack packs looked like a fun way to start and play: https://www.crunchlabs.com/products/hack-pack-subscription?p...

I run the electronics of an art university. My recommendation is to (1) start with the basics, that probably means getting an Arduino (or simulate one using wokwi) and working through some basic examples and play around and customize them. Then (2) pick an ambitious but realistic project that you can work on in stages. Maybe you build a simple robot that can turn and go forward with wheels on a flat surface for example. You can then expand it with more sensor capabilities as you go.

It is very important that you just do it. There is no way of learning to play the guitar without actually playing the guitar.

Buy a robot kit from Pololu Robotics

I recently got started and as others have said, it helps to have some idea of what you want to do, since 'robotics' is such a wide field. In my case I was curious if I can get LLMs to drive a robot, so I bought a quality, mostly-assembled chassis (https://www.waveshare.com/ugv-beast.htm) that let me focus more on software and sensors. If you want more low-level stuff, you can make your own chassis (motors, 3d printed parts, arduino/esp32 programming), you can make your own attachments to chassis like the one I have, etc. On the software side, you can focus on navigation/mapping or operating actuators on a stationary base, you can run small specific models (segmentation/etc) paired with classical algorithms, you can run VLAs (LLMs that output motor actions instead of words). There's really quite a bit to do.

I wrote a bit about how I got Gemini to drive my rover here, it might give you some ideas of what the software side looks like: https://martin.drashkov.com/2026/02/letting-gemini-drive-my-...

Lots of ways to start. None of them are wrong. Just let your passions lead you to something you’d like to explore. Maybe start with a hackable 3D printing kit that will let you build parts for more robots. Hacking the 3D printer can directly teach you a lot about robotics.

https://simplefoc.com/ Is my type of rewarding nerdy topic. You might be more attracted to other control strategies.

Mastering robotics as a DIY thing is usually more about the mechanical (particular linkages and kinematics) as well as electrical (particularly motor control). The programming part of it generally can be lower quality and more hacked together, but still can be an area of deep exploration if that’s your passion.

https://youtu.be/pJj6uGcMco4?si=J0ui8LzYxEBXePZ0 ‘Engineer Bo’ is a small YT channel with a few great videos about stepper motor control. This video is about protecting the motor driver chip from large surges of electricity when the motor tries to wuickly “brake”. There’s a second video where he iterates on this solution.

If you don't find the mechanical and electrical parts something you want to invest enough time in to learn, and want to just dive into the programming side, then you could focus on simulation entirely. In that case, look into MuJoCo or OpenAI Gym (ported and maintained by community as ‘Gymnasium’).

Don’t be afraid to ask LLMs to help you learn. They might lie to you or occasionally send you down a non-optimal path, but they’ll be helpful first exposing you to so many of your current blind spots and helping understand the scope of any endeavor you might be interested in.

If you do decide to really invest in learning the electrical and mechanical sides, it can be worthwhile to truly learn them. This would involve following something like MIT’s open courseware (or similar) for electrical and mechanical engineering. You can get away without formally teaching yourself these, but it would unlock “real” engineering. Multivariate calculus is possibly enough for the mechanical side, but for electrical you’d also want to understand how to utilize differential equations. So in total, somewhere between the equivalent of 2-4 semesters of calculus. Linear algebra can help as well, but plenty of people without these math skills make really cool stuff in robotics.

You wouldn’t necessarily need to do the calculus and differential equations by hand like we did in University - as long as you can set up, manipulate, and solve the problems using computer software (numerically, maybe some symbolic manipulation) that would be enough for the hobby.

For enjoying robotics “as a consumer” (rather than as a do-er) there are some fun YT channels, which could either inspire you or scratch the itch passively just enough to rob you of the initiative to actually do it yourself:

Stuff Made Here

Mike Shake

Allen Pan

Michael Reeves

I did a thing

CodeBullet (towards the pure simulation side. this channel helps me when I’m feeling like a poorly educated useless engineer because it shows me that even the absolute lowest effort, dumbest approaches and worst execution can produce something both fun and rewarding. That can help me get out of ruts sometimes)

AlphaPhoenix (absolutely next-level explainers and demos of fundamental electromagnetic concepts and phenomena. The 3B1B of EM physics.)

Trying to build a robot is the way to start the robotics hobby. Reading about robots, studying physics etc. are different hobbies and fine in their own right, but not a robotics hobby.

There is no wrong way to do a hobby. Good luck.