Increased accessibility through robotics to museums and countless other places is no longer a dream of the future, it's a reality in many large institutions. The challenge now is to translate these advances for use by the masses.
Can be used for prototyping parts, electronics assembly, biotech lab-on-a-chip experiments, and assembling small mechanical systems in hostile environments -- like museums? :-)
Social robots are simpler to interact with than humans, can repeat games with infinite patience and record the data for further study.
Applications with Alzheimer patients too?
I went to this great open house yesterday on campus, "Robot Block Party." Everything from the Nasa robotics team to amateur tinkerers frankensteining robots in their backyards. A couple people from the Exhibits team at the Cal Academy showed a kinect-powered robot they had been tinkering with as a side project, where - their idea - would be to put the robot (with a camera) on the roof, and you'd be able to "drive" it using the kinect inside the museum. And of course, there was the self-driving race car, complete with the ubiquitous Stanford parking sticker.