OStatic

If you happen to own a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, you already have a robot in your life. (I have a Roomba, and highly recommend it--available at Target.) Roomba is a classic example of how a robot doesn't have to be humanoid to be useful. In the open source community, though, there are several efforts to develop robots that look and/or act like humans, performing interesting and useful tasks. They're not C3PO at this stage of their development, but they show tremendous promise, especially if more open source contributions are made to the projects. Here are a couple of good examples to take a gander at.