The Dartmouth Robotics Lab is making some progress on that long-sought after idea of reconfigurable robots. Sounds like a simple but great idea: make robots as series of similar modules that can be reconfigured for various tasks. There are problems but don't all cool things have problems?

It's not completely clear to me how useful these configurable robots will be in the near term. I think the main benefit is not being mentioned much: mainly that of making robot manufacturing easier - you simply make MORE of the same device, not different devices.

Check out the website for more info.