We should embrace and be leaders in this field

"Science-fiction fans take heart — robots are finally about to take over the world. It won’t be quite like the blockbuster films, but it’s being predicted that by 2019 the global robotics market will exceed £100 billion worldwide.

Increasingly, we will have service robots in our homes to carry out menial tasks, entertain us and take care of tedious admin.

The market for such home-helpers alone is predicted to reach £19 billion in two years.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4166054/We-test-new-breed-robots.html#ixzz4X1UW6XfF

Automation is likely to play a significant role in the deployment and maintainence of any significant or long term initative - as much as day-to-day life.

To become leaders in this field will take significant effort - many have a long head start. It will take time to even catch up with the gimmicky toys in the daily fail link provided. Companies like Honda, Mitzubishi. iRobot, Lockheed Martin, Samsung, Toyota, Boston Dynamics, Hitachi, panasonic etc will be a little more difficult to be better than. It's going to be quite some time before we're building things the likes of Asimo or even Atlas.

We should definitely embrace leaders in such fields - but I question if they would be so eager to embrace us. It may be "best" for us to initially focus into industrial automation techniques, these typically provide easier to control input variables. Things like OSRF and ROS may be worthy of attention.