Robotics really is the last pillar of Artificial Intelligence. It is surmised that without a substrate, algorithms "inside of a box" would remain just that. Giving AI a substrate that can interact with the natural world would be compartmentalized. Onboard systems handling the real world situations with most of the heavy intelligence being called upon from the cloud.
This divides the system in two, such that most of the heavy lifting is taken from the cloud, and the onboard systems handle most of the mundane real world situational awareness. Humanoid robots are expected to come online sometime within the next two decades, reducing latency and reaction times to 1ms, nearly 200 times faster than humans.
For comparison, an average human blink is between 100-400 ms long.
