well, robotics actually applies pretty much to a specific field of autonomy, all robots share the features of a mechanical, movable structure under some form of autonomous control. The structure of a robot is usually mostly mechanical and can be called a kinematic chain (its functionality being akin to the skeleton of the human body). The chain is formed of links (its bones), actuators (its muscles) and joints which can allow one or more degrees of freedom. Most contemporary robots use open serial chains in which each link connects the one before to the one after it.
Mechatronics is where it's at today. Inkjet printers, manufacturing arms, washing machines, etc. We just don't have the semantic frameworks or languages to really do robots properly... yet.
The sort of autonomy which signifies a real robot is at least 5 to 10 years away for mass market deployment. The ability to self-programme is the real key, and for that you need some very mature code. I get the feeling that the robots of the future will write their own Java. This will mean that their character is written in a higher level API of some sort.
Do the US military have this stuff? Hell yeah. Is it armed? Damn right. Yes, today the only real robots are Skynet, Cyberdyne systems, Terminator.
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