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-...

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.

If you are after it for fun, comments have you covered. If you are after it for work, don't; the community is toxic and full of Dunning-Kruger individuals, gatekept, and there's this weird vouching too. A lot of fraud, either on an individual level by over-marketing themselves to get a job, or at an organizational level where so many demos you see around are mostly not as accurate as they claim, and the last straw is unfortunately a lot of it recently is shifting towards weaponized robotics with all that that means. Also, because all software folks are having a hard time finding jobs, they are flocking into robotics, which has disturbed the balance in supply and demand. It has turned into a competitive field with low wages, and if you complain, there are hundreds willing to take your spot, or you're being told that you work on "cool stuff, so that's your reward!!" In Canada, for example, I have seen "senior robotic engineer" positions with job descriptions enough to build a spaceship that pay 65K Canadian dollars, meanwhile a snowplow operator operating a machine while listening to music makes 110K. So the juice isn't worth the squeeze now, but if you are after fun cool projects, then by all means please do. I would love to see more robotics content here on HN.

Look for three papers on "integrated mental architecture" and personality, psychopathology then drill down to experimental robotics and begin from a standard text and devkit.

If the goal is to find a hobby why are you asking? Usually a hobby is something you find fun.

Go through the ROS tutorials, using a simulated robot at first, then buy a tiny AMR kit and do the same thing IRL. Once you have those basics, you can ask yourself into which direction to go next, the obvious choices being 1) deeper into the research of the new-fashioned (bi-)manual manipulation (arms), or 2) more into business and actually build a real-world application for your mobile robot (which will involve a lot of tinkering with hardware). And +1 on what brudgers said. It's a hobby, so have fun.