The military has been investing huge amounts of money into robotics for decades now, and most of the advancements in capability have been linear (and expensive). But now the exciting thing is that thanks to Willow Garage, Aldebaran-Robotics, and FIRST, the accessibility of robots has fallen to a point where we have thousands of researchers and hobbyists working on robotics constantly, building open-source software and raising the abilities of all robot platforms. Higher accessibility will drive capability exponentially, just like it did in the 1980s.

The cool part is that capability and accessibility are one in the same chain. If you pull from either end, the other follows.