You've probably known about this already for ages, Nakamura-san of Himeji Soft Works in Japan have developed a real-life transforming robot based on the Robo-One style battle robots. There's more background in English here: http://www.robots- dreams.com/2006/02/a_car_and_a_rob.html
And a clip here:
http://www.youtube.com/w/Real-Transformer?v=dut6jxCiakg
This shit is incredible. There's a video of a robo-one battle linked from that clip with Great Mazinger kicking the other robot's asses. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ2iVZBdMo0
It boggles the mind how fast we've gone from the big Honda walkers to highly articulated miniature wrestling robots.
man those look like so much fun!
http://www.robots-dreams.com/2006/02/a_car_and_a_rob.html
just fixing the link so I can click it...