New to Robotics - Seeking advice

Hey all, very happy to be part of this community. I am fairly new to robotics, with a background in Electrical Engineering. I have recently decided to get into robotics and need some guidance through this journey.

I am intermediate level in Python, beginner level in C++, have a relatively good maths and physics background. I recently started some ROS2/Gazebo/Rviz courses, as of now I am comfortable with packages, nodes, topics, servers, clients, subscribers, publishers, urdf. I know there are a lot of resources out there, but advice from the community would be very useful.

  1. Would you recommend a particular learning plan or resources? For now I just have a couple of high rated Udemy courses I am going through one by one. I try to pick the most recent ones so it’s relevant to current operating systems/packages.

  2. Any recommendations for good starter mini-projects ? I would like to use these to grow my projects portfolio.

  3. How can I increase my online presence in the community and contribute to open source projects ? I have gone through some topics on here and seen very helpful answers but would appreciate other perspectives considering how fast things move nowadays.

  4. Would you recommend the use of AI for projects? This has been making me think a lot since I started. Right now I do not use any AI tool in my learning process and turned off any AI suggestions when doing course assignments. This has helped me a lot in recognizing stuff like node structure, functions, how to troubleshoot a broken package, terminal tips etc. I guess my main question is: when I start building projects, how much of the work should I delegate to AI, if any ? And how can I make sure I properly oversee it ?

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read my post. I look forward to hearing from you. And of course, more than happy to connect.

Tagnon