Really still kicking myself for not majoring in robotics in school. I wanted to program, so I studied computer engineering but hadn't really absorbed that much in classes. But I will likely never have access to all the robotics stuff my school had, nor the guided learnings.
Never too late to try stuff out of course, but very little beats structured higher ed education in relatively small classes (think there was only about 24 people in the robotics major?)_
Nothing beats concentrated work. You can do that without formal education. It might even be easier: you can probably afford pretty good arduinos and raspberries and H-bridges and sensors and actuators and...
It shouldn't be hard to go beyond what almost all universities provide.
On the other hand, the one robotics course I took involved getting access to computers at 3am and doing horrific matrix multiplications by hand that took hours. Of course, this was a long time ago.
Never too late to try stuff out of course, but very little beats structured higher ed education in relatively small classes (think there was only about 24 people in the robotics major?)_