The Globe and Mail has a piece on the fact that more money is flowing into robotics research. I know that's true at BYU, where there are several labs with robotics research of one kind or another going on. Somedays its hard to negotiate the hallways without tripping over a robot of one kind or another. When I was a graduate student, I managed the Robot Lab at UC Davis for two years and really want to do a dissertation in robotics, but there were no CS faculty in the area (just EE control theory types) and I decided it was too hard to create a research topic all by myself. Nevertheless, I had quite a bit of fun working on some rudimentary vision systems, force sensors and programming the PUMA arm to shake hands. That's where I learned Linux and got my first system administrator experience. A good memory.