Commanding robots by looking at them and waving | SFU Autonomy lab | http://youtu.be/Vv-rYx73Uqs

Miuro - a multimedia droid

Miuro - a multimedia system equipped with camera and sensors that follows one around the house. Equipped with Wifi, it can play internet radio and mp3s from an iPod. The robot can be easily trained by tapping it with a hand and “showing” the motion path.

http://miuro.com/

Robotics and DIY Projects

1. Robotics projects from EDN:
Robotics Project (sound sensing, hardware, soft)
Platforms and development tools
CoroBot - fast robot prototyping (runs Windows) - fast but expensive too!

2. Dogoid - a diesel powered four legged robot that is made to carry load over a heavy terrain. Current application is mostly for military use. The really cool part about it is its very natural movement! The videos on the website show robot recovering from a push, ice slip, walking on snow downhill and other. A must see!
Dogoid on PLDesignline: link
BostonDynamics: link

3. The guys at Gostai.com (France) are working on a Universal Software Platform to allow the reuse of code from one robotic system to another. They've created a language (URBI) that brings together parallelism, and event-based programming, works on Windows, Linux and MacOS and is interfaced with C++, Python, Java, C#, others. There is a number of commercial robots that are now supported and can be easily programmed using the existing URBI code created by the URBI community, including Sony's Aibo doc, Create, Mindstorm, Bioloid, KHR2, etc.
Key innovations: link
URBI's innovations video, small tutorial showing how easily a robot like Aibo can be programmed: link
List of currently supported robots: link