Electrical Engineer to Robotics: 7 Roles and How to Get In

An electrical engineer designs, builds, tests and improves systems that run on electricity, from power grids to the tiny circuit boards inside a robot’s wrist. In robotics, that work covers motors, batteries, sensors and the embedded electronics that connect them, which makes electrical engineering one of the most direct degree paths into the field. This guide covers what the job involves, which robotics roles you can target, and how to build the skills hiring managers look for.

DegreeBS, electrical engineering

US accreditationABET

LicensureFE, then PE (optional)

Robotics fitMotors, power, sensors, embedded

What an Electrical Engineer Actually Does

Electrical engineers work with three broad things: power, signals and control. Power means generating, converting and delivering energy safely. Signals means capturing, processing and transmitting information, whether that is a radio link or the voltage from a strain gauge. Control means making a physical system do what you want, at the right time, without oscillating or overheating.

In practice, the work splits into design, testing and production support. You might spend a week running calculations on a power supply, two weeks laying out a printed circuit board (PCB), and then a month in the lab chasing noise on a sensor line with an oscilloscope. Electrical engineers also write specifications, review other engineers’ schematics, work with suppliers on components, and help production teams fix problems that only show up at volume.

The field is huge. Electrical engineers work in utilities, telecommunications, consumer electronics, automotive, aerospace, medical devices and semiconductors. Robotics borrows from almost all of those, which is why the degree transfers so well.

Electrotechnical engineering, electronics and the naming mess

You will see several names for overlapping disciplines:

Electrical engineering is the umbrella term in the US and most English-speaking countries. Historically it leaned toward power, motors and large equipment.
Electronics engineering focuses on low-power circuits, semiconductors and signal processing.
Electrotechnical engineering is common in European usage and translations (German Elektrotechnik, Dutch elektrotechniek). It generally maps to electrical engineering as a whole.
Electrical and computer engineering (ECE) is how many US universities name the department, reflecting how much digital design and embedded software now sit inside the degree.

For robotics hiring, these labels matter less than your coursework and projects. A recruiter at a robot arm company cares whether you can design a motor driver, not which department printed your diploma.

Why Robots Need Electrical Engineers

Strip the plastic shell off almost any robot and you find the same electrical building blocks. A warehouse mobile robot, a dog robot climbing stairs, and an industrial arm welding car frames all depend on them.

Actuators. Most modern robots use brushless DC (BLDC) or permanent magnet synchronous motors, driven by inverters running field-oriented control (FOC). Someone has to design the power stage, choose the MOSFETs, tune the current loops and keep the thing from cooking itself.
Power systems. Mobile robots carry lithium-ion battery packs with a battery management system (BMS), DC-DC converters for different voltage rails, and protection circuits. Battery life is often the spec customers complain about first.
Sensors. Encoders, IMUs, force-torque sensors, cameras, lidar and tactile skins all need clean power, proper grounding and reliable interfaces.
Communications. Joints and controllers talk over buses like CAN, CAN FD and EtherCAT, plus SPI and I2C on the board level. Bad cabling and poor shielding are a classic source of mysterious faults.
Embedded compute. Microcontrollers run real-time control loops at each joint, while a larger computer handles planning and perception.
Safety. Emergency stops, safe torque off, and compliance with standards such as ISO 10218 for industrial robots and ISO 13849 for safety-related control systems are electrical problems as much as mechanical ones.

Even simple machines need this. Cartesian systems, the XYZ gantries used in pick-and-place and 3D printing, still rely on motor drives, limit switches, encoders and a motion controller. Humanoids multiply the problem: dozens of actuators, each with its own driver, sensors and thermal limits, packed into a body that has to run on batteries.

Engineer's note

When a robotics company says it designs its own actuators, read that as “we employ a lot of electrical engineers.” In-house motor drivers and joint electronics are where much of the cost, reliability and performance of a robot gets decided.

A Day in the Life of an Electrical Engineer at a Robotics Company

No two days look identical, but a hardware-focused electrical engineer at a mid-size robotics startup might spend a typical Tuesday like this:

Morning. Stand-up with the hardware team. A field unit reported intermittent encoder faults on joint 3. You pull the logs, see CRC errors on the bus, and suspect a connector or a ground loop rather than firmware.

Late morning. Design review for the next revision of the motor controller board. You question a trace width on the high-current path, ask the layout engineer to move a gate driver closer to its MOSFETs, and flag a capacitor that is going end-of-life at the supplier.

Afternoon. Lab time. You put a current probe on the motor phases, run the joint through a test trajectory, and capture waveforms to check that the new current loop gains meet the spec without ringing. Then you set up a thermal soak test that will run overnight.

Late afternoon. You meet with the firmware team about a new fault-detection feature, then write up test results so production can update its end-of-line testing procedure.

That mix of design, testing, debugging and cross-team communication is normal. Electrical engineers in robotics rarely work in isolation, because every board you design ends up bolted to a mechanical part and controlled by someone else’s code.

7 Robotics Roles for Electrical Engineers

Job titles vary between companies, but these are the roles where an electrical engineering background gives you a clear edge.

Role	What you work on	Core skills
Motor control / actuator engineer	Motor drivers, FOC, joint electronics	Power electronics, control theory, embedded C
Power and battery engineer	Battery packs, BMS, DC-DC converters, charging	Power electronics, thermal design, safety
Hardware design engineer	Schematics, PCB layout, component selection	Circuit design, Altium or KiCad, signal integrity
Embedded firmware engineer	Microcontroller code, drivers, real-time loops	C/C++, RTOS, communication protocols
Sensor and perception hardware engineer	Cameras, lidar, IMUs, tactile sensing	Analog front ends, interfaces, calibration
Test and validation engineer	Test rigs, reliability, EMC, production testing	Lab instruments, automation, statistics
Functional safety engineer	Safety circuits, risk analysis, certification	ISO 13849, IEC 61508, failure analysis

A few notes on each:

Motor control is the most robotics-specific path, and good motor control engineers are hard to find. If you enjoy control systems and power electronics courses, this is where to aim.

Power and battery work matters most at companies building mobile robots, humanoids and autonomous vehicles. Self-driving truck developers like Aurora also need engineers for high-reliability power distribution and redundant electrical architectures.

Hardware design is the classic electrical engineer job. In robotics, the constraints are tight: boards must fit inside joints, survive vibration and handle high current next to sensitive sensor signals.

Embedded firmware sits on the boundary with computer engineering. Robotics firmware engineers often avoid dynamic memory allocation in real-time code, which is why understanding how the heap works in C and why embedded code avoids it is a practical skill, not trivia.

Sensor hardware roles reward strong analog skills. A force sensor that drifts with temperature can ruin a manipulation demo.

Test and validation is an underrated entry point. You learn the whole system quickly, and the statistics and test automation skills carry over into any later role.

Functional safety is a specialty that grows more valuable as robots move closer to people. Collaborative arms and mobile robots in shared spaces all need it.

How to Become an Electrical Engineer

The standard route is a four-year bachelor’s degree, then experience, with licensure as an option depending on your field.

Quick steps: becoming an electrical engineer in robotics

Earn an ABET-accredited bachelor’s in electrical engineering.
Take control, power electronics and embedded electives.
Build hands-on robotics projects or join a competition team.
Land an internship at a hardware or robotics company.
Pass the FE exam if licensure matters in your field.
Specialize through work experience or a master’s degree.

Coursework that matters most for robotics

Every electrical engineering program covers circuits, signals and systems, electromagnetics, digital logic and math through differential equations and linear algebra. For robotics, put extra effort into:

Control systems. Transfer functions, PID, state-space and stability. This is the theory behind every joint that moves smoothly.
Power electronics. Converters, inverters, switching losses and gate drive.
Electric machines and motors. How BLDC and induction motors actually produce torque.
Embedded systems. Microcontrollers, interrupts, timers, ADCs and communication peripherals.
Digital signal processing. Filtering sensor data is a daily task in robotics.

If your program offers a robotics or mechatronics elective, take it. It forces you to integrate mechanical, electrical and software constraints, which mirrors how robotics teams work.

Licensing: FE and PE

In the US, the path to a Professional Engineer (PE) license starts with the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam, administered by NCEES. After several years of qualifying experience, you can take the PE exam. Licensure is close to mandatory in power utilities and consulting, where engineers sign off on public infrastructure. In robotics product companies, very few hardware engineers hold a PE, and employers rarely require one. Passing the FE while the material is fresh is still a cheap insurance policy if you might move into power or industrial work later.

Projects beat grades in robotics hiring

Hiring managers at robotics companies consistently weigh hands-on work heavily. Strong options include:

Robotics competition teams such as FIRST (for high school), VEX, RoboMaster or university rover and Formula Student teams.
A custom motor driver board you designed, built and tuned yourself.
A small mobile robot with your own power board and sensor integration.
Research in a university lab working on legged robots, manipulation or drones.

Document everything: schematics, waveforms, what failed and why. A short write-up showing that you found and fixed a ground loop says more than a GPA.

Skills and Tools to Build

Beyond coursework, these are the tools you will touch on the job:

Design: Altium Designer or KiCad for schematics and PCBs, LTspice for circuit simulation.
Modeling: MATLAB and Simulink for control design and system modeling.
Lab equipment: Oscilloscopes, current probes, logic analyzers, bench supplies, electronic loads.
Programming: C for microcontrollers, Python for test automation and data analysis.
Robotics software: Basic familiarity with ROS 2, the middleware many robots now use, helps you talk to the software team and debug system-level issues.

Learning to work with CAN bus on Linux is a good weekend project, since many robot joints and battery packs speak CAN. With a USB-CAN adapter and the can-utils package, bringing up an interface and watching traffic looks like this:

# Install CAN utilities (Debian/Ubuntu)
sudo apt install can-utils

# Bring up the CAN interface at 500 kbit/s
sudo ip link set can0 up type can bitrate 500000

# Watch all traffic on the bus
candump can0

# Send a test frame with ID 0x123 and two data bytes
cansend can0 123#DEAD

Being comfortable at this level means you can sit with a firmware engineer and actually find the bug instead of passing the problem back and forth.

Pay, Demand and Where the Jobs Are

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics groups electrical and electronics engineers together, and its most recent data puts median annual pay above $100,000. Check the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook for current figures, since they update regularly. Pay in robotics varies widely by company stage, location and specialty, with motor control and power electronics specialists typically commanding a premium because the talent pool is small.

Robotics hiring clusters in a few areas: industrial automation and robot arms, warehouse and logistics robots, autonomous vehicles, drones, surgical robots, and the current wave of humanoid startups. Large, well-funded programs need electrical engineers at scale. Funding rounds like Eka Robotics raising a $150 million Series A, as reported by TechCrunch, usually translate into hardware hiring within months. If you want a broader map of who is hiring, start with the established robotics companies in arms, logistics and autonomy before chasing the newest startup.

Reality check

Humanoid hype does not equal stable jobs. Many humanoid programs, including Tesla Optimus, have not yet proven production at scale, so weigh a startup’s funding runway and real deployments before you join.

Electrical Engineering vs Other Robotics Degrees

Electrical engineering is not the only way in. Here is how it compares:

Degree	Strongest robotics roles	Gap to fill
Electrical engineering	Motors, power, sensors, PCB, embedded	Mechanical design, high-level software
Mechanical engineering	Structures, kinematics, actuators, CAD	Electronics, control implementation
Computer engineering	Embedded systems, firmware, compute	Power electronics, analog
Computer science	Perception, planning, ML, ROS software	Hardware, real-time systems
Mechatronics / robotics	Systems integration	Depth in any one area

The honest take: electrical engineering gives you the deepest hardware foundation, and that foundation is hard to learn on the job. Software skills are easier to pick up later than a working understanding of switching power supplies and electromagnetic compatibility. If you know you want to build robot hardware, electrical engineering is the strongest single choice.

FAQ

Can an electrical engineer work in robotics?

Yes. Electrical engineers design the motor drivers, battery systems, sensor electronics and embedded boards that every robot depends on. Motor control, power electronics and hardware design are among the most in-demand robotics roles.

Is electrical engineering or mechanical engineering better for robotics?

Neither is universally better. Pick electrical engineering if you want to work on electronics, power, motors and control. Pick mechanical engineering if you prefer structures, mechanisms and physical design. Robotics teams need both.

Do I need a master’s degree to work in robotics as an electrical engineer?

No. A bachelor’s degree plus strong projects or internships gets you into most hardware roles. A master’s helps for research-heavy positions, advanced control and some perception work.

What does electrotechnical engineering mean?

It is a term used mostly in European contexts for electrical engineering as a whole, covering power, electronics and related systems. In English-speaking job markets, employers will simply call the role electrical engineering.

Do electrical engineers need to code?

In robotics, yes. Expect to write C for microcontrollers and Python for testing and data analysis. You do not need to be a software engineer, but you need enough skill to debug your own hardware and work with firmware teams.