Robotics have been around forever, it's only by being AI driven will it gain interest and funding. No one wants to laboriously hand write gcode to actuate a motor to move an arm. People want to ask the robot maid to make coffee for them in a regular human coffee making fashion. A French press or a pour over or whatever. Traditional programming hasn't been able to achieve that in the decades it's been around, so the only way robotics is getting interesting (which it is) is the addition of AI/ML models.