Rodney Brooks, founder/CTO of iRobot and founder of Heartland Robotics lays down the four challenges keeping the robotics industry from going full mainstream.

Make robots that have:

• The vision of the four-year-old child: can deal with shape abstractions, new textures, etc.
• The language abilities of four-year-old child: understand concepts, accents, etc.
• The manual dexterity of a six-year-old child: complex manipulation operations
• The social awareness of an eight-year-old child: theory of mind

Seems a ways off but that’s the type of lasting challenge an industry needs to rally around.