I'm from England, and was interested in AI, because one of my long term goals is to design a new Search engine, which uses an AI type system to provide better search results, based on your preference stored in cookies, but as I say, I thought that would give me lots of things to learn, and would be a long term goal.
My interest in robots is more to do with smaller designs, but again its one of those things i would like to do, because it represents a challenge with an interesting goal. Of course both AI and robot design go hand in hand, and one of my aims was to build a small independant robot. I think that the definition of AI is what defines the solution. For me, intelligence is an interaction between your world through interfaces, and your basic needs of survival, or purpose. The clever bit is introducing interaction, and the ability of the program to change if the environment does. i beleive it is possible to do by scaling down the world, and environment, therefore having a limiting factor, and a finite solution. Is human intelligence not an interaction between our interfaces, (eyes, taste...) and our needs for survival. Are our emotions not a neurowhateveritis firings, that tell our brain if we are on the right track to survival or not.
Still, it's a complex subject, and would require months of work that the results of which would no doubt be extremely limited.