>>12307022Thanks, I've jumped around degrees a bit. I'm doing a double degree, but I've completely finished my CS major.
I originally went into mechatronics right after highschool because I've always been into robotics. Then I picked up cognitive science because I realised I'm pretty interested in the brain/ pure logic/ epistemology. Then I realised it made more sense for me to study computer science which covers a fair bit of that but actually has job prospects, and I enjoy programming.
But yeah basically I've always thought that automation will be the next industrial revolution so to speak, and that it would be ideal to try and cash in on it - and I won't lie, my 17 year old self partly just thought "mechatronics" sounded cool.
Using ML learning for optimisation was one of my first ideas, I had the idea to make ‘smart’ power outlets to manage your usage with machine learning, only to find out that that’s already a product you can buy. Another idea I'm toying with, inspired by a math assignment I just finished where I had to create a system of ODEs representing the current in the human heart: maybe I could use machine learning to detect anomalies in heartbeats, I think that might be how some smart watches do it. But I also don't know that it would be necessary, there might be more effective traditional control systems for that.
I saw an interesting paper recently for a CS masters thesis where this guy attempted to recreate the falcon 9 landing system with machine learning in a python simulation.
As for CAD, I only had to do one unit on it. Which is a bit of a shame because I actually enjoyed it
I'd say it probably helped a little in knowing a lot more coding for MATLAB than they expected us to. But we only did relatively basic CAD, designing basic machinery and running some simple simulations with them. I still have a year to go though so we'll see.
