Matt Jones and Boing Boing link to a group of feral robodog hackers at Yale. I find this summary of Aibo software capabilities most interesting.

• "An interested note is that AP_COLORLVL, part of an Aibo program, can be used to identify the distance to a known size object such as a ball."
• "Most interesting note was that in the future, the program attachment 'AP_Rhythm_Horz' would be able to detect where a sound came from."

Aibohack has a short section on getting started with Sony's Open-R Aibo SDK (which doesn't seem to be particularly open), but it really is short, and short on detail too.