[JamesBrown]

For what it is worth.

I have the same interests academically and professionally as you do. I am at RPI for Computer Systems Engineering (Usually just called Computer Engineering at other schools) I love the program and have had tons of opportunity to do Robotics programming. I will be graduating in December and already have a job doing "Embedded Systems Design and Robotics Control Programming" for robots that inspect nuclear power plants. Basically I will be working with high level electrical hardware (FPGA's) and Low level control software.

I started as a pure Computer Science major but found the classes to be too abstract for my liking. However that may vary by school, my schools CS department tends to hire professors with concentrations in more abstract parts of CS like pure Algorithm Design.

The best thing you can do is talk to students and professors at the schools you are looking at. As others had mentioned it is also a good idea to avoid a very specific concentration. While I was fortunate to find a job doing exactly what I wanted to do you can't always count on that. I also applied to Software engineering positions and had offers to fallback on if I didn't get the job I wanted.

It may be looking into Automation, Embedded Systems, and Embedded Control, all of these things are essential the same as robotics but are the terms used in industry. For example the lab I worked at at RPI was the Center for Automation Technology, which may or may not show up in a search for robotics programs.