Last week, Aldebaran Robotics was at the University of Memphis at the FedEx Institute demonstrating their NAO Robot. I found out about it because one of my students went there to eat lunch and saw it. I wish I would have known earlier to let everyone know he was coming, because it is an impressive little robot.
A humanoid robot about 2 foot high, 25 Degrees of freedom (ie joint movements), 2 cameras and a bunch of other sensors. It is programmable via a graphical programming language, a text based language, or by just manually moving the robot (and it will mimic those moves).
For the $6,000 -> $9,000 price tag, it was very impressive considering that only a few years ago similar robots would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I particularly enjoyed its dancing:
Currently the robot is only being sold to educational institutions, but I think that they are getting it out there to researchers to help develop routines and programs and hopefully they will open it up to the consumer market in the future.
Also they just opened an office here in the US.
For more info visit their website at: http://users.aldebaran-robotics.com/index.php