We couldn't even convert to the Metric system in America, I'm not saying its impossible but if you can't point to a clear benefit from it, why incur the cost?
I also think that right now the cost of robotics comes from the complexity of the software more so than the hardware. We have plenty of commodity hardware, and the actual robotics chassis/effector/sensor stuff is not all that expensive in perspective, but the software is a giant tangled mess of projects that do the same thing in different ways. (At least on the open source side). There have been moves lately to fix that, like the Gearbox project, but overall it is still a lot of people spending a lot of time reinventing the wheel.
I also think that right now the cost of robotics comes from the complexity of the software more so than the hardware. We have plenty of commodity hardware, and the actual robotics chassis/effector/sensor stuff is not all that expensive in perspective, but the software is a giant tangled mess of projects that do the same thing in different ways. (At least on the open source side). There have been moves lately to fix that, like the Gearbox project, but overall it is still a lot of people spending a lot of time reinventing the wheel.