Anhinga anhinga

This is a prototype of an elderly home care robot developed by a very small group at IBM (with the benign indifference from their employer corporation that does not want to deal with robots and headaches and liabilities associated with robots). Its ability to verbally communicate with a human and to learn from a human is very impressive (basically, one can program this robot to a large extent simply by talking to it). Here is a demo video from the talk at the AGI-12 conference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2RXDI3QYNU

The paper itself, "An Extensible Language Interface for Robot Manipulation", explaining to some extent how this works can be found here:

http://www.mindmakers.org/boards/18/topics/73

and the free online version of AGI-12 proceedings is here (scroll down to AGI-12 Contributed Paper Sessions):

http://www.mindmakers.org/projects/agiconf-2012/wiki/Schedule