I've been under the impression that getting into robotics has never been easier. For the past 10-15 years, high-schools have had easy access to things like Lego mindstorms, etc.

Small microcontrollers and computers like Arduino, Raspberry Pi has made development much easier, as you're no longer stuck with writing Assembly or C to get something working, and there are tons of modules that are easy to interface against.

Back when I started out playing with robots, as part of my microcontroller and control engineering classes, we were stuck with writing ASM. Same with components, like motor controllers, sensor networks, and what not. Lots of vero and perfboard, lots of soldering.