Robotics also requires a thorough understanding rotations and transformations (and its time derivatives), thus requiring a bit of Lie algebra. The calculations itself aren’t that complicated, but the concept is still quite confusing for beginners and quite intimidating if you go deep down into theory.

In addition, almost any control system with feedback requires some variant of PID control. “I” as in integral and “D” as in derivative makes it hard to get away from calculus concepts

I took a grad robotics course while in grad school for another degree. Doing all the translation matrix multiplies by hand was so much fun before something like Matlab existed. (As was going to the computer lab at 3am to do the simulations because that was the only time there was time available.)