Technical interview guide

Sensors & Actuators

How a robot perceives its environment and acts on it — the hardware interface between software and the physical world.

Read: 45 min
Practice MCQs: 25
Interview QA: 25
Edition: v4
Editorial status: Reviewed
Relevant for: Robotics Engineer

Scope: Current NIST SP 800-82 Rev. 3, Arduino, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, NXP I2C, OSHA, and IEC functional-safety guidance reviewed 2026-09-04.

Interview QA

Treat each question like a live interview question: answer out loud first (structure, assumptions, tradeoffs), then open the model answer to spot gaps and rehearse a tighter follow-up.

Curated: 2026-10-05 · Written: 2026-10-05 · Reviewed: 2026-10-03

QA-1

Create a sensor measurement requirements and error budget.

QA-2

Evaluate whether increasing ADC resolution improves a design.

QA-3

Choose sampling rate and anti-alias filtering.

QA-4

Design and validate an oversampling strategy.

QA-5

Design a calibration lifecycle for field sensors.

QA-6

Design and troubleshoot an I2C sensor bus.

QA-7

Choose between I2C, SPI, and UART for a sensor.

QA-8

Design a robust digital input for a mechanical switch.

QA-9

Choose PWM frequency and duty cycle for an actuator.

QA-10

Design a low-side solenoid driver.

QA-11

Design and protect a motor actuator channel.

QA-12

Choose open-loop versus closed-loop actuation.

QA-13

Design sensor-fault handling in a control loop.

QA-14

How do you calibrate an analog sensor, and what is the difference between zero error and span error adjustment?

QA-15

Integrate emergency stop and guarding with normal control.

QA-16

Design grounding, shielding, and isolation for analog sensing.

QA-17

Design online diagnostics for a sensor channel.

QA-18

Design communications-loss handling for sensors and actuators.

QA-19

Design position feedback for an actuator.

QA-20

Design saturation, rate limiting, deadband, and anti-windup.

QA-21

Design power-up, reset, watchdog, and brownout behavior.

QA-22

Secure a network-connected actuator path.

QA-23

Design useful and bounded observability for an embedded control channel.

QA-24

Define sensor and actuator reliability metrics.

QA-25