Sounds like a good reason to get an employer to sponsor a Portuguese vacation immersive learning session.
I have always generally been in favor of working around other people, it definitely helps both in getting questions answers quickly and also holding yourself accountable. Without peers there, it’s pretty easy to just play Mario Wonder rather than studying hard robotics problems.
One thing I have participated in in the past are weekly “hack nights”, where like-minded people would get together and work on their projects in parallel, but in the same place. While this happened in a physical location, with the global ROS community, maybe it would make sense to do something like this via Discord’s voice/video chat system. In order to keep it productive, people would have to treat it seriously and not just as a Q&A session or office hours, though.