Here's a specific technology that's going to be a huge boon to robotics in the next 5-10 years: Flash LIDAR cameras. This is the technology behind the XBox 360's "Project Natal", but it's a lot more than a game controller. A Flash LIDAR camera directly senses the distance to every object seen by the camera by measuring the time-of-flight of a reflected laser pulse. With accurate distance data for every pixel a lot of really hard computer vision problems suddenly become much, much eaiser.