Mechanical engineer having troubles with neural network. Am I going in the right direction? Is my data set insufficient?
If the training loss is “huge” it suggests that the is a bug in the model or the model is not sophisticated enough.
Do not confuse training loss with generalisation. Generalisation is measured by accuracy on the test set.
With regards to training data have you tried data augmentation? Can you apply transformations to the training data to derive new samples. E.g if I train a model to drive a car based on video input and control output the video and control inputs can be flipped to turn left turns into right turns?