[hershel]

Amazon recently purchased a company that builds warehouse robots(kiva robotics) for a quarter billion dollar. This company had sold systems for some reasonably large warehouses.

Those are pretty good signs that robots in the warehouse are about to happen in a mass scale.

Also ,there are rumors that amazon is building large amounts of robots , and will launch a service in 2015 based on those(just rumors).

And to the question why does it take so long? for many expensive technologies, 20 years from talking to industry acceptance is normal.It takes time to improve the technology in reliability , cost, performance , convince industry to use it and scale it.