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GetRobo has pointed out a new website by Francisco Paz, which focuses on his experience building an open source personal robot called Qbo.  From the few images on the site Qbo looks remarkably well made and quite similar to NEC’s PaPeRo, meaning it might be used to experiment with image processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and (assuming it has wheels) obstacle detection and SLAM.  He also mentions in his blog some of the open source software that’s out in the wild such as OpenCV, Festival, and Sphinx, which would allow you to do some of that.

Tiny microbots swimming through liquid invariably conjures up images of Isaac Asimov's sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage.But while microbots exist, and they can be made to swim, it's getting them to change direction that has been tricky so far - a bit of an issue if you're even planning on sticking them in a human body, for instance.Now a system used to propel swimming microbots without the need for on-board fuel has brought this idea one step closer. Researchers at North Carolina State University have coaxed their bots to perform U-turns on command.