[spieswl]

Because it is. There is an abundance of tutorials showing people how to get Gazebo simulations going, or set up a rudimentary classifier in Pytorch, or actuate motors with Arduino using whatever framework of the week (I even wrote some!).

The hardware has really made strides too, easy and cheap sensors, controllers, cameras. It's awesome how quickly someone can plug-and-play a Realsense with a servomotor or pneumatic slide and start manipulating the world.

The thing that's usually underappreciated is that once you understand how to code a robot, you are barely closer to having solved a practical problem. There are lots of practical problems in the world where spending 4 hours learning how to use $PERCEPTION_API would be actually better spent spending 4 hours understanding more about the widget being perceived or the object being manipulated. Getting into robotics has never been easier, getting something useful out of robotics is still the trick.