With commas instead of semicolons, it would not be clear that item 2, sensing and perception, is not a subsection of science and technology of robots or not a continuation of the motion-planning and control list. As it happens, that is not made clear with semicolons either; here is a possible interpretation of the original version:
...requiring knowledge in a number of key robotics science and technology areas, including robotics motion-planning and control; robotic sensing and perception; and robotic artificial intelligence.
By changing the order of the list you can avoid that problem:
...requiring knowledge in a number of key areas, including artificial intelligence, sensing and perception, and robot motion-planning and control.
Note, I shortened “science and technology of robot motion-planning and control” to “robot motion-planning and control”.
Given that at least some of the entries in your list contain embedded colons, I agree with Benubird that—if you want to present the list as part of a normal sentence layout—you need to introduce special punctuation marks (specifically, quotation marks) to clarify each entry in its entirety.
For instance, suppose that you want to talk about the following four classes:
English 323: Victorian Lycanthropy
Cultural Anthropology 212: TV Watchers of Southern Indiana
Biology 316: Our Friends the Protozoa
Economics 202: How Are You Going to Pay for This?
Obviously one way to present the list is the way I just did—as an unnumbered list. Or you could add bullet points before each entry. But if you want to run the list as part of a normal-looking paragraph, rather than breaking it out as a series of single-line entries, your best bet is to identify where each entry begins and ends by putting each class name into quotation marks (the way I show it below is standard U.S. style; standard UK style, I believe, uses single quotation marks and puts the commas outside the end quotation marks):
Four classes that appear to be especially popular this semester are "English 323: Victorian Lycanthropy," "Cultural Anthropology 212: TV Watchers of Southern Indiana," "Biology 316: Our Friends the Protozoa," and "Economics 202: How Are You Going to Pay for This?"
The quotation marks clearly indicate the names of the various classes, thereby avoiding any possibility that the colons might be read as anything other than internal punctuation in the various class names. Under the circumstances, you don't need anything stronger than commas to connect the entries in the series, although you could use semicolons (outside the quotation marks, in normal U.S. style) instead of commas if you wished.
If you don't add quotation marks to the entries, neither commas nor semicolons (in my view) are strong enough to immediately clarify where one entry stops and the next begins.
Best Answer
I read this sentence as containing two main clauses: "it's about creativity, proving . . . problems" and "it is about the arduous moments . . . surging epiphanies." These clauses are separated by a semicolon, which is perfectly fine. The second clause contains a list that is also separated by semicolons, but I see no reason to use semicolons in that list. (Semicolons are usually used in lists only when commas would cause confusion.) I'd simply replace them with commas:
Of course, this is a very long sentence, and you could make it even simpler by breaking it up into separate sentences.
By the way, I see two more issues: 1) Most of the definite articles seem awkward to me, because as far as I can tell, most of the items are not specific. Some of this is a matter of style, but I'd probably delete most of the definite articles. 2) The list in the first clause (assuming that it is a list of three items) omits the Oxford comma, while the list in the second sentence retains it. That is inconsistent.