Turtlebot

Although this may look like every other small trash can style robot which has existed in the previous couple of decades it's really a big deal.  The Turtlebot is both low cost, having a total cost of probably less than $1500, and it also has SLAM and autonomous navigation capability.

It could be argued that Neato got there first, but the Neato is, as far as I'm aware, a special purpose cleaning robot not intended to be hacked or reprogrammed by users.  The Turtlebot is really what the WhiteBox robot from five years ago would ideally have been, except without the fancy molded casing, and of course if those robots are still in production there's now an opportunity to fulfill Tom Burick's original concept of a home robot costing about the same as a high end PC.

This is the Sinclair Spectrum or C64 of robotics.  It's not glamourous and it doesn't have a simple to use GUI, but there's enough functionality to potentially build some interesting applications and since the software is open source it's completely hackable.  Just like with the early home computers, anyone with sufficient interest and a low budget could construct one of these and start messing around with it, with only minimal effort and without needing to be an expert in robotics algorithms.  There is still plenty more work to be done before robots can carry out many useful tasks beyond their existing cleaning or telepresence niches, but this is the beginning of a new service robotics industry.