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)