Back in high school, I spent every afternoon in my robotics lab. We were a dedicated team of 6 kids that always strived to make the next best robot for whatever competition we were competing in. I began my involvement in robotics by joining the team freshman year, but I only furthered my interest over the next three years. Ultimately, I graduated from my high school robotics team community, but I am still part of the robotics community today. The thing that truly fascinates me about robotics is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of what humans are capable of coming up with, whether it be Boston Dynamics making another robotic walker that can basically avoid any obstacle you throw at it or a marine biologist trying to design a drone to survey the bottom of the ocean. The most fascinating part, however, is the fact that humans are constantly working on robots to build and design other robots.
This spans into an entirely different field that ties in very well with robotics: artificial intelligence, or AI for short. AI is the concept of a computer being programmed to learn to do things rather than to just be told to do a specific thing. This ties into robotics through teaching robots how to learn how to do things. Take self-driving cars as an example. They cannot be programmed for every single scenario they can possibly see. Instead, they are programmed to collect and process data to learn the proper response to different scenarios. This fascination of what the future holds is one of the main things that kept my team close. We would always focus on the next greatest innovation and try to analyze how it is possible. The next step for my involvement within the robotics community is going to be me working on another robotics team once I find one to the college level and eventually being involved with the future of computer learning and robotics.