What is the difference between robotics engineering and mechatronics engineering?

Mechatronics engineering is the broader discipline of designing any integrated mechanical-electrical-software system, including many products that are not robots at all. Robotics engineering is specifically focused on machines that sense their environment, make decisions, and act with some degree of autonomy — the perception-planning-action loop. The two overlap heavily and many engineers move between them, but robotics engineers typically go deeper into motion planning, kinematics, and perception software, while mechatronics engineers spread more evenly across mechanical design, power electronics, and embedded systems for a wider range of automated (but not necessarily autonomous) products.

What do robotics engineers actually work on day to day?

It varies by specialization. Integration-focused robotics engineers select robots and end-effectors, design work cells, and program motion sequences using tools like RobotStudio or RoboDK. Software-focused robotics engineers write perception, planning, and control code, often using ROS/ROS2. Controls-focused engineers tune the feedback loops that keep a robot's joints tracking commanded trajectories accurately. Across all of these, safety validation — especially for cobots working near people — is a common and essential part of the job.

Do I need to know ROS to become a robotics engineer?

It depends on the role. ROS/ROS2 is close to a baseline expectation for robotics software, research, and mobile robotics roles, since it is the dominant open-source framework for structuring perception, planning, and control code. Traditional industrial robot integration roles (programming a fixed six-axis arm on a production line) rely more on vendor-specific programming environments and offline simulation tools like RobotStudio or RoboDK, and may not require ROS at all, though familiarity with it is increasingly valued across the field as robotics work leans more toward flexible, perception-driven automation.

Engineering·9 min read·July 29, 2026

🦾 What Is Robotics Engineering? A Complete Overview

What robotics engineers actually design and build, the core sub-disciplines (kinematics, control systems, sensors and perception, ROS), how robotics engineering relates to mechatronics, key tools (ROS, RobotStudio, RoboDK, PLCs), and typical career paths.

📖Robotics & Automation Handbook (Full Access)

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What Robotics Engineers Actually Do

Robotics engineering is the discipline of designing, programming, integrating, and maintaining machines that sense their environment and act on it autonomously or semi-autonomously — industrial robot arms on a production line, mobile robots navigating a warehouse, collaborative robots (cobots) working alongside people, and increasingly, humanoid and legged robots operating in unstructured environments. A robotics engineer's job is fundamentally about closing the loop between perception, decision-making, and physical motion: a robot has to sense the world (through cameras, force sensors, encoders, or lidar), decide what to do with that information, and then actually move in a way that accomplishes the task safely and repeatably. That three-part loop — sense, plan, act — is the thread that runs through almost everything a robotics engineer works on, regardless of whether the robot in question is a six-axis arm welding car bodies or a mobile robot picking orders in a fulfillment center.

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