I see robots like Rovio out there, that claim to be "wireless" or "wifi", but it SEEMS like they expect you to use their included software to control the robots. Is there any way to control an existing commercial robot (or even just read an available wireless sensor, such as light or motion) from a command line, or curl? (For example, hitting the robots ip, and port it is listening on, and sending a web services, or soap, or even http message, or ANYTHING). Even just being able to listen to a sensor from a command line would be a help...
Basically, most "programmable" robots out there have lightweight languages on them, and you have to physically store the code on them, so you're pretty limited. What I want to do (and SURELY this exists) is have a robot that is completely client-light and server heavy (i.e. all the intelligence and logic is stored on some machine that wirlessly commands the robot). That way I could code in any language (and have arbitrarily long code base), so long as I could send dumb wireless commands to the robot (such as move forward, give me your sensor data, etc)
Does such a thing exist in any form?
ROS, which is quite popular these days, provides facilities to off-load code to a larger machine, featuring distributed nodes. As long as you remember that you need the communication stack, motor / manipulation control etc. right on the robot, you can pretty much implement the whole heavy-duty control anywhere you like.