I highly recommend watching a talk given by Erik Nieves from Motoman at the most recent RosCon because he talks about the state of the robotics industry and why

I highly recommend watching a talk given by Erik Nieves from Motoman at the most recent RosCon because he talks about the state of the robotics industry and why this "gap" exists in a very accessible way. http://vimeo.com/67044628 http://vimeo.com/67044628 Two reasons why I think the gap between getting started and being able to build something useful exists is that robot parts are still much more expensive than we expect them to be and the fundamentals of robot movement are much more difficult to learn than we expect them to be. Unfortunately, I think those two factors discourage a lot of engineers early on and is why the size of this community is so small. I feel very fortunate that I have a Kuka YouBot to hack on. The company I'm trying to get started with two friends wrote a proposal that got accepted into the sponsored track of a competition Kuka is running. (http://www.kuka-labs.com/en/network/innovationaward/ http://www.kuka-labs.com/en/network/innovationaward/) After setting it up, it's clear why this is a 20,000€ robot. But before you can actually DO anything useful with it, you have to be able to understand kinematics and dynamics as well as how to get path planners to talk to controllers. And then the really powerful stuff becomes possible once you incorporate computer vision, which is also not an easy topic to understand. It not surprising that most of this work is being done at universities by grad students. The state of ROS today feels a lot like what Linux felt like to me back in the late 90's. There are lots of issues with dependencies and programs not compiling correctly. Documentation is severely lacking. But there's lots of enthusiasm from very friendly people to help each other work to make things better. What makes me worry is that many of the advances in ROS came from Willow Garage and Google is buying up many of the companies that spun out of Willow whereas a lot was made possible in computer vision due to the sensors made by PrimeSense, which was just acquired by Apple. I hope the Google vs Apple rivalry doesn't slow the pace of progress in open source robotics that was making the dawn of non-industrial robotics seem not so far away.