Robotics technology programs prepare people to help engineers who design and use robots. Students learn principles of robotics. They also learn to design, build, run, and test robots.
Robots are here, but forget the other robots you've seen in science fiction movies. The robots we now have don't look at all human, but they're doing a lot of useful work for us. They're exploring wrecks on the ocean bottom. They're spying on enemy troops while flying overhead. They're looking for life on the surface of Mars. They're entertaining us by putting up their dukes on a cable TV show.
By definition a robot has to have some mechanical functions and some electronic "sensory" and "brain" functions. For example, a robot that sprays paint on car bodies has mechanical parts that move the spray nozzle over the surface to be painted and that force the paint out in a fine mist at just the right rate. It also has instruments that detect the position of the target. Finally, it has a computer chip programmed to move the nozzle through a precise series of points at just the right speed. How complex is it to create all this? Consider just one part of the process: It takes a specialist three to five months to program the robot.
When you study robotics technology, you learn both the mechanical and the electronic parts of the whole. You study physics and how circuits on a chip can do logical operations. You learn how electric motors work and how air and water pressure can accomplish useful tasks. The goal is to teach you what you need to know as part of the team that designs, builds, and maintains these machines. So you also learn how to represent designs graphically on a computer. And you study the properties of materials so that you understand what it means, for example, to use brass instead of steel to make a certain machine part.
You can enter this field after studying two years full-time beyond high school. This earns you an associate degree in robotics technology. About 25 colleges offer this degree. With it, you are likely to do work in troubleshooting and maintenance. You may also gather data to help engineers in research projects. If research and development are what you want to do, you may want to study an additional two years and get a bachelor's degree. You can specialize in robotics within some four-year manufacturing technology programs. Mechanical engineering technology programs also sometimes offer this as an option.