What is the scope of Electronics Engineering in Robotics/Automation?
You don't like programming, but you want to do Robotics?  You're on to a real loser there then.

A huge amount of the work on robotics is done in programming to tell them what to do.  Mostly in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, object recognition, environment interaction, etc.

But of course robots wouldn't exist without electronics.  It's all very well being a whiz kid at programming, but if the robot doesn't have decent electronics it's not going to work.

It's best to think of a robot and its fields of engineering as a human body.

The human body has a brain. It has a skeleton and musculature. It has a nervous system.

The brain is the programming.  It's complex, it's powerful, it's an entire masters degree all to itself.

The skeleton and musculature is mechanical engineering.  Motors, actuators, solenoids, all that kind of thing.  How do you make a robotic hand actually move at a physical level.

Then there's the nervous system.  Connecting the brain to the muscles, nerve endings in the finger tips, optic nerves, eyeballs, all that kind of thing.  That's where the electronics come in to play.

No one part of that mix can exist without the rest. You can't have a robot without a body. You can't control the muscles without a brain. The brain can't tell the muscles what to do without a nervous system.  All fields are as important as each other and a good understanding of all three of them is important for a good understanding of robotics.

Of course, you can specialize, and it's good to specialize - especially if you are going to be part of a team. If you team up with programming specialists and with mechanical engineering specialists then all of you together can make a good team. But you still need to have some knowledge of the other fields.  You need to know how to interface your electronics to the brain, and how the brain is going to be talking to those electronics.  You need to know what kind of motors and sensors and feedback systems are going to be needed and how they will be manipulated by the robot as a whole.

So I'm sorry, but really you're going to have to suffer some programming, and some mechanical engineering, to complement your electronic engineering.

Typical things you would need to be concerned with in electronics for robotics though (others, please feel free to suggest more) are:


Sensors
Vision systems
Motor driving - servos, stepper motors, BLDC, etc
Signal conditioning
Transmission and communication systems
Computer interface technologies
Power transmission and control
EMI hardening
Interlock systems


... and I'm sure there's more.  So pretty much the entire field of electronic engineering.