Space.com is carrying this article on how Segway is helping robotics researchers tackle advanced projects. By using a stripped-down version of Segway's people-mover, scientists are able to concentrate on, well, "everything else", like terrain avoidance, AI programming, even modeling the human brain.

I've always wondered why this hasn't been done before. It would seem to be a pretty good idea to just come up with something that walks-rides-drives and handles all of that functionality, and then set another computer on top of that to steer.