Skills Recap

You're about done with Term One of the Robotics Nanodegree program! Let's recap your accomplishments thus far.

You got familiar with ROS, building the foundations for all of your later projects.

Did you know? Companies from Intel (worldwide, from San Jose to Beijing) to Interactive Robotics (Delft, Netherlands) to Dyson (worldwide, including Malmesbury, South Africa) directly ask for experience with ROS in their job postings.

You dove deep into kinematics and controlled a robot arm.

At that point, you developed enough robotics skills to build products important for businesses. You were ready to participate in competitions like the Amazon Robotics Challenge, where teams worked to fill the gaps in warehouse robotics.

In the rest of the term, you worked on applying the three core elements of robotics: perception, decision making, and actuation.

You focused on computer vision, which is also a main part of Udacity's Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program. This is one of the fundamental components not just to cars, but most robots including consumer robots like Kuri from Mayfield Robotics.

How does a robot locate a needle in a haystack? You learned how to tackle problems like that.

When studying Controls, like Ryan said, you learned the fundamentals of algorithms used to control 95% of the world's robots. You should definitely add these skills on your resume.

Finally, in your last project, you combined your perception and decision making robotics skills with deep learning, and built a "follow me" application important across robotics. Deep Learning is starting to emerge as an effective way to train robots to perform complex tasks that were previously unobtainable. Google is using deep learning to train robot arms to pick up unstructured objects in cluttered environments.

Add These Skills to Your Resume

You should feel comfortable adding these skills to your resume and LinkedIn.

Python
ROS, Gazebo, RViz
Linux
OpenCV, Sci-Kit Learn
Kinematics, Deep Learning, Computer Vision

Tip You'll find more job postings if you search by skill, rather than job title. Do boolean searches on platforms like LinkedIn for combinations of the skills above.

What's Next?

In term 2, you can take advantage of the GitHub and LinkedIn Profile Reviews included in your Nanodegree program. The career projects are there to help you communicate your new skills in your job application materials and networking profiles. Even if you don't have immediate goals to find a new job, maintaining good health in both these platforms will increase your visibility to others, including potential collaborators or industry professionals.