Flock math department here. Robots are software-limited, and Flock has more overlap with robotics on the software side than people might think. At Bump we have been writing software to exchange bits of stuff between computers that 50% of the population has attached to their bodies. Flock is actively making decisions for the human based on situational awareness. The machine learning and statistical techniques we are using are the same ones that are being using in robotics for e.g. situational awareness and path/task planning.
If anyone out there is interested in being a developer in my group and is handy with algorithms and fast data stores e.g. Redis, ideally in production, email me.
I only bring it up because in the first paragraph you said it started as a side project. I apologize for my comment though, this was a bad thread to post it.
My original point though, was that sometimes I feel like we make these apps, because that's what we're capable of making by ourselves. The links you posted are great opportunities for what we can do together. But I think there's still a large opportunity out there. Think about how many people actually completed the Stanford AI course. I think it was something close to 20k. There's a HUGE amount of people who have day jobs, but have the potential to do BIG things on the side. Except they're all off on their own, so they build iphone apps.
I think you'd touch a lot more lives if you worked on solving the photo sharing problem for 3 years than working on electric airplanes for 3 years. Also: your comment is rude.
See diydrones.com -- lots of ordinary hackers making extraordinary things. By the way, the people at bump do it by choice I'm sure. No one's forcing them to make a photo sharing app. :)
If anyone out there is interested in being a developer in my group and is handy with algorithms and fast data stores e.g. Redis, ideally in production, email me.