Picture of the AIBO water suit (taken a while ago but showed yesterday at the Sony CSL Paris 10 years event in Paris), it has actually been designed by students from ECAL:

This was part of the exhibit "A Robot's Playroom" (Frederic Kaplan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Martino d'Esposito and ECAL Design Students):

In the exhibition, an intriguing set of objects is displayed that together make up a "playroom" for the Sony AIBO. This is the result of the work of design students from ECAL, supervised by industrial designer Martino d'Esposito and CSL researcher Frédéric Kaplan. These objects offer new learning opportunities for AIBO. At Sony CSL, Frédéric Kaplan and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer have been experimenting for several years with curiosity-driven robots. They were looking for novel environments that the robots could explore. Creating such a playroom was an exciting excercise for designers who are usually accustomed to deal with human needs only. Thanks to the creativity of the ECAL student, AIBO can now draw, ride a bike, control switches, pick up everyday objects, watch itself in a mirror, and even more.

Why do I blog this? that stuff is intriguing at first glance but the whole point is really to see the robot acting in its own playroom, which makes sense. Customizing it with new tangible artifacts is then a way to put the robot in a new environment and see how curiosity/robot enaction works out in that context.