That's interesting, and your Perl scripts sound like the sort of thing I would utterly fail at were I to attempt to create them. What about the hardware of the robots though? Would all of the various interesting parts be covered by patents, etc., and thus be unsuitable for opening up? (Sorry if my questions tread on NDA territory - that's one long-lived NDA.)
Not at all! It wasn't that bad -- the object files just needed to have sections that had particular size restrictions, names, etc. Nothing too tricky.
I don't recall the hardware being too separately encumbered. Sony Research provided all of the early adopters with significant technical specifications about the hardware itself, though admittedly much of it was documented in Japanese and this is ~10 years before google translate. I remember one other independent research group rewrote all of Sony's dynamic stability code and was able to increase walking speed significantly, and there was a lot of that level of information available.
