Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Frédéric Kaplan of the Sony Computer Science Lab have a released a paper (PDF format) online which was presented at the 4th International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics. The paper describes a mechanism by which robots can be given intelligent, adaptive curiosity which guides their focus to novel situations in which they can learn. Their system is implemented in a robot simulator using a simple two-wheeled robot which learns about the behaviour of a nearby toy. For more on this research, see Sony's Curiosity Driven Learning webpage.