RoboLassie to the Rescue

This came to me on the Deadbeef mailing list, but was too cool to pass up: :DOGBOT Engineers at Sony's D21 lab have developed a robotic dog, complete with 64-bit central processing unit, 8 megabytes of memory, and a supersensitive camera "eye" that enables it to obey motion commands -- if you stick your hand out, Dogbot will sit. The robot is reconfigurable, so that the owner can swap out limbs or even the head, and each module is "intelligent" -- equipped with its own motor and control chip. Toshitada Doi, head of the D21 lab, says he thinks there will be a consumer market among children for the dogbots sometime around 2000. (Business Week 20 Jul 98)".
What a fun world we live in.