Roboticist

A roboticist is a specialist profession involved in the design, construction, and maintenance of robots, droids, and synthetics. Robotics engineers have been critical for automating industry for hundreds of years, but the development of the first general-purpose robots in the early days of interstellar travel marked a shift in their role. While industrial robots are specifically designed and programmed for a single task, general-purpose robots, droids, and synths are created to perform any job imaginable, from farming to research to manufacturing, and in some cases, even politics. This involves work in developing hardware, software, firmware, and for synthetics, positronic matrices.

Most roboticists work in dedicated production complexes, specialising in a particular field of expertise. Some roboticists focus on developing the software that runs the robots, while others oversee the production lines producing them. The production lines themselves are automated, as specialised industrial robots assemble the general-purpose robots with precision. These factories use economies of scale to drive down production costs, with the largest factories seeing tens of millions of units leave the production lines per day. Custom-made robots are therefore substantially more expensive, requiring specialised facilities to retool their machinery and create individualised designs for small-run production.

Robots may be constructed by a national government or private corporation, but generally they are built for the same purpose: to generate additional workforce that can work in a variety of sectors. Robots and droids are treated as property, but depending on the jurisdication, synthetics may be regarded as fully sapient citizens, or no different from their droid bretheren. In the former's case, robotic assembly complexes are sometimes viewed as the reproductive organ of synthetics, and roboticists as mechanical doctors bringing new life into the universe.