Perhaps coming soon to a house near you is a personal assistant robot based on this cool design of active stability rather than a static platform of wheels or, worse, clumsy robot legs. Check out the videos (here’s one) showing the “Ballbot” moving around on its single spherical foot at the bottom of the page. My colleague Glen remarked that the ballbot’s locomotion is reminiscent of the Jetsons’ assistant Rosie. For the moment it doesn’t appear to do much other than locomote, but it’s much easier to imagine this as a platform for something you could actually have around the house than the clumsy cart-like contraptions that can’t handle obstacles. It reminds me of the Segway personal transport thing-a-ma-jig that is great fun to ride around on (here I am having a ridiculously good time spinning around Prague in July 2005).