Across robotics... Lots! Many of them are in manufacturing (eg Kuka, Schunk, etc). There are lots in the military (eg UAVs in the big defense companies). There are lots in automation (eg Festo and Parker Hannifin). There are in logistics (eg. Kiva, before being acquired by Amazon). There are lots in healthcare (eg intuitive surgical). And its pretty clear that autonomous cars are on the horizon at this point.
A lot has changed since 1983... We're seeing a resurgence due to the confluence of major improvements in several key components: processors, displays, batteries, connectivity, sensors, and algorithms (including AI and ML). Unsurprisingly, many of these are being driven by Moore's Law and Cellphones. You can think of a robot as a "Cellphone with actuators" and you wouldn't be too far off. The actuators haven't changed too much since 1983... but the cellphone part has.
It's ok to lose money developing such technology. There's a long road ahead, and we should be impressed with those willing to invest now.
Maybe the funding from Google, Apple, Uber, Volvo, GM etc. isn't venture capital, strictly speaking, but I would assume that it easily dwarfs most of the funding mentioned on the list.
So far, the only profitable autonomous products are industrial robots and vacuum cleaners. (The surgical robots like DaVinci are teleoperators.) Even Boston Dynamics, in the end, failed to produce a usable product; the LS3 (the militarized version of BigDog) was canceled.
The technology is much better today than ever before, and there's a lot that could be done. But so far, there's nothing that's cost effective enough to be produced in volume. Except robot vacuum cleaners.
If robot vacuum cleaners were cost effective and able to keep out out of trouble (such as getting snagged in cords) most offices would be using them. That's not happening yet.
[1] https://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers...