[Will]

Actually, Comp Engineering is a field you can go in for robotics... as long as you're only doing research. Right now, the "real" jobs in robotics are in manufacturing, like tesco said, companies like GM, Toyota, Honda... car makers, pretty much. There are a few others, but I don't remember them at the moment. Basically, they make robots for assembly line manufacturing processes. But these are mostly Mech Engineers, who have gotten a little extra training in computers, basically MEs who took CS courses for tech electives at university.

As I said, Comp Engineers going into robotics are usually doing research, and there are only a few places in the private sector where this is currently done (mainly in Japan, with companies like Honda and Sony), a few places in government (NASA/AMES, ESA), and... academia. Unless you're really stellar or become the protege of someone, you'll most likely either end up in academia, or decide you want to do something else. Academia means four years at least for the BS, plus one if the university offers a 5-year master's program, plus 1 and a half to 2 if the university doesn't or you go somewhere else for grad work. Then there is usually about 5 more years doing PhD work, then about 7 years in a rush to get tenure somewhere. So, conservatively, you're looking at 18 more years of "school" after high school. Although some people have done it in about 10. YMMV.

For now, most of the "cool" stuff with robots is happening in Japan, and at universities. Japan has Asimo (Honda), and Aibo and its ilk (Sony). Universities mainly have government defense grants, for things like little black helicopters to look in windows, distributed "bug bots" for mapping a building (before storming it), and a bunch of projects focused on active vision (processing visual data in real time and acting on it, rather than recording for human operators) happening at my school specifically.

Academia could be the best place to go -- if there is an explosion in the robotics industry, where all of a sudden someone comes up with the working killer app for robotics (such as Asimo becoming feasible to care for the elderly, both in performance and in cost). If/when that happens, there will be lots of companies grabbing to get anyone from university robotics departments that they can, and paying very well for them to do... well, basically the same stuff they were doing in academia, only applied a bit more to a specific product.