As for an Expo, I highly recommend ATX West show in a couple weeks. Depending on your employer, you probably could get it covered by your job and have your nephew come along.
(Was a Design MechE for a decade or so, but I'm a SWE now)
Quick aside: Automate small/mid business manufacturing? Admirable, but will probably choke on the scale problem, so I think the journey will be vastly more interesting than the destination...which is good! Turns out there's a lot of robotics that can be broadly applied.
* Manufacturing --> robotic manipulation, controls, actuation, sensing, decision-making
** Robotic manipulation --> Linear algebra, likely Python and/or C++, some simulation tools
** Controls --> Manipulator platform, drivers, physical- and protocol-level choices
** Actuation --> You want to pick something up right? Air powered? Electric? Probably not hydraulic, but worth mentioning?
** Sensing --> What's your sensor suite? RGBD? LIDAR? Forces-torques? Combination of the above?
** Decision making --> FSM? Behaviour trees? Purely functional?
Repeat the decomposition and you'll probably be able to get down to the basic level of the robotics hierarchy of needs.
It largely depends on what you’re automating, no? That standard seems absurd.
Let's keep the useful image parts.
“How many of you are from manufacturing companies?”
[Some hands go up.]
“Oh, excellent. Where are the rest of you from? Okay, so how many are from consulting?”
[A number of hands go up.]
“Oh, that’s bad. Yeah, the mind is too important to waste—you should do something.”
“I think that without owning something over an extended period of time—like a few years—where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see those recommendations through all action stages, accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes, pick oneself up off the ground, and dust oneself off, one learns only a fraction of what one can.”
3Blue1Brown and Khan Academy are great places to learn math of all sorts.
Told him we should go together to industrial expo - starting from 3d printing, molding, material science and robotics and spend some time together to hack into hard core C++ SDKs used by big tech like Nvidia and Co, and look how to developed linear algebra and statistic on real life examples.
His dream is to automate small mid business manufacturing, and become a Steve Job like figure one day.
What’s the good information and resources to follow and educate about real life robotics?
Any tips or even sarcastic comments are welcome. Please help to be a cool uncle ;)