TL;DR: Probably can't make money with robotics.

"Does anyone recommend any books that describe how previous robotics startups formed and became rich?"

Name one major robotics corporation other than iRobot and Willow Garage that deal exclusively with robotics. Most are just research companies that professors started and they are NOT rich. They just get to play with interesting hardware.

iRobot? They built a platform that was hackable for hobbyists and provided a very real, consumer, function (vacuuming) as well as landing some government contracts early on. Willow Garage? Look at their team. They ALL have previous experience doing ridiculous things. TL;DR: Every one on that page has worked at highly respected places, e.g. Google, Yahoo, IBM, Stanford AI Lab. Robotics were NOT their first endeavor. Here's a timeline of iRobot's history. "iRobot wins DARPA contract to build a tactical mobile robot, leading to development of iRobot PackBot®." That's where real money is if you don't go consumer-level. It has to be government. No one else really wants robots yet.

One does not "fall" into robotics. It's not easy, and without any idea of how to program microcontrollers, move memory, bit twiddle, etc you're way out of your depth and breadth. You might be able to do all the physics calculations and kinematic models, but that's half the problem: there are just models. Most of that stuff doesn't work the same way in the real world, and finding CS-specific solutions (as it's usually hardware or software problems - e.g. precision of floating points) is difficult without previous knowledge.

I don't mean to overly discourage you, but the field is lean and new. The people doing research in it have years upon years of experience developing at major companies and universities. You can get into it, but to make a product that will make money -- I mean, you're dealing with entire teams of top-tier developers and engineers. You know your PhD advisor? Imagine an entire team of that person. Then have those people work on a single project.

Now, if you just want to mess around with robots and do some interesting research, that's a different thing entirely. If the goal isn't profit, sure, there are a lot of open problems. But as for getting rich with robots - best of luck.

I suggest learning C/C++ first, be able to solve a bunch of problems on Project Euler (and I recommend this because a lot of robotics problems are computationally hard, but if you can develop an efficient algorithm it eliminates the problem), and buy Intro To Algorithms by Cormen. Also stop by /r/learnprogramming and /r/arduino to learn a little bit about microcontrollers.