Ok, so I'm thinking the need for this could become huge. How does one get into this industry as a programmer? What would I need to learn? What kind of diplomas are useful? What should I start practising on?
Need to have:
Systems/RTOS experience. ie. not spend a week chasing your tail when you stupidly put a printf in an ISR which changes timing so the code works, but then when you pull out the printf it stops working.
Be able to read schematics and datasheets. I'm not expecting you to design a board (we have EEs for that), but you should absolutely be able to be given a schematic and a datasheet and then write a driver for a simple peripheral.
Basic understanding of control theory. Being able to articulate what a PID loop is and why open control loops are a bad idea is probably good enough.
Being a self directed learner. Robotics tends to be fairly low volumes all things considered (or atleast my branch of it). We have issues with vendor support not really caring about what happens to us since our volumes are so low. We therefore have to own significantly more of our tooling and have to be able to peer in to what our vendors would prefer to be treated as black boxes quite a bit. Any RE experience would go a really long way here in my book.
Nice to have:
Good understanding of mechanical engineering/physics terms like stiction. Ostensibly if you have the skillsets written above this you can be taught this, but this lowers the bar for hiring you quite a bit.
you've just eliminated perhaps 90% of the folks who've recently decided to switch to "hacker" as their career! ;-)