Computer Science or Electrical Engineering for building smart devices and robots?

Nida,

First off, I really have to apologise for how long it has taken me to respond to you. I had a baby last year and in the lead-up to that I really lost track of a lot of my messaging. I'm very, very sorry! Thank you for taking the time to write to me!

It's an honour to know that you consider me a role model, but I have to say I'm incredibly impressed someone living in a culture that strongly discourages women from doing jobs like this reaching out and pushing the boundaries of what would normally be expected of you. Congratulations to you for having the strength to do that, and I wish you the best of luck!

It's a great question you have. I think the answer really depends on your interests. You can work on smart devices and robotics with either of those degrees, so if you happen to love one more than the other, it shouldn't matter too much. However, if you are still torn, it helps to look at what the "hard problems" are in each of those fields, and what those degrees might enable you to do to solve them.

For example, in smart devices, the biggest challenges include industrial design (needing to blend into the home or be attractive enough to be wearable), miniaturisation of electronics (especially sensors), battery power, user interfaces, and smart networking. Does any of those sound particularly exciting? That might guide you in an electrical or CS direction.

Within the robotics industry, the biggest challenges include the design and manufacturability of mechanisms, sensor fusion, development of new advanced sensors, battery power (this is a big, big issue for robots!), artificial intelligence, autonomous navigation, networking and communication, and human/robot interfaces. Again, some of these might stand out more to you than others, and you could choose appropriately.

Based on my own university experience, I would say CS would probably set you up better for a graduate degree in robotics, if you want to get a PhD some day -- most graduate research projects I know of require a lot of programming, and they tend to focus on the hard software problems in robotics. Electrical engineering degrees often have a programming requirement, so you would learn some software engineering along with the EE side, and that may be preferable if you want a broad introduction to engineering and to apply it immediately in industry. 

Honestly, though, I don't think you could make a mistake choosing one over the other right now. Both will be applicable to the fields you're interested in, and both will teach you *how* to engineer well enough that you can learn the material from the other discipline if you need or want to in the future. 

Please feel free to ask other questions if you have them, and I promise that this time it won't take me six months to respond! Again, I'm very, very sorry.

Regards,

~Mikell