In my school we make line following robots with 14 year olds that are programmed using a couple of cheap micro controllers and cost about £4 in total. $1000 seems a little excessive.
turtlebot is like $2k, for example:
The next generation will probably be playing around with $50-100 robotic toys analogous to today's Raspberry Pi.
There are advances out there, but as long as one can't buy a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars it's not going to progress that much.
Also, there are shape memory alloys and they are essentially a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars. You could concievable bundle them together to make a larger muscle, but you will probably have to do some active cooling if you want any sort of decent response curve and even then motors can be a lot faster.
What I think we could really do with is a linear actuator with a simple built in clutch that doesn't take power to hold a position.
You're absolutely correct re clutching actuators. There are a lot of robotics projects out there that combine small devices with limited mobility to create a larger (multicellular) robot with higher mobility. All of these projects stumble on that particular aspect: maintaining a lock without consuming power. M-Tran, Symbrion, Distributed Flight Array, ...
I built an optical feedback robot arm for under $100 [1]. At work I use a robot where an individual sensor costs $100,000
The algorithms are much the same though. Doing control on cheap hardware is more challenging, so if you can do something on cheap hardware, you really have done something noteworthy! Expensive hardware pays for reduction of noise, it treats the symptoms of reality but does not solve them.
To truly solve the robotics issue of environmental noise, you have to solve it in software which is really hard but can be investigated cheap on cheap hardware. Robot projects fail because of software, not hardware normally. You should always build the software stack before spending lots of money on hardware.
[1] http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/05/robotics-adaptive-contro...
Here are some cheap ideas:
1. Improve the robot arm control I outlined above. There is a huge market for cheap robot arms you could scale the ideas prototyped in [1] upto.
2. Active face recognition, put a camera with a zoom on a pan and tilt. Try to zoom into peoples faces for better recognition. Animals exploit shitty eye hardware with active attention in a way our current robots don't exploit.
3. voice activated inventory system for electronic components. Every hackerspace can't find the components they own. Popout a component tray via a push gantry behind it.
4. 3D hardware localization system. Actually determining the position of something is hard. Its the building block for gather training sets to do more challenging problems