This Mobile Surveillance Robot looks like the Mars Rover and has the pretty much the same job: gathering data on its environment and relaying it back to a home base. In this case, though, that home base is your PC, and its environment is anywhere you want it to be. Moving along on its rather unimpressive treads, the SRV-1 can crawl up to half a mile an hour. A Zigbee transmitter relays the video to a wireless module that you connect to a PC within 300 feet. However, with the included software installed on the host PC, you can check in on what the palm-size bot is seeing from anywhere in the world, live via the Web. You may need to know a thing or two about Java to set it up properly, but the peace of mind you'll get by being able to keep watch on your house while away will be… wait for it … priceless. — Peter Pachal

ThinkGeek, via The Red Ferret Journal