The Portland Area Robotics Society is now having meetings every other Monday at TechShop. These are in addition to their normal monthly meetings. The idea is to have a more informal meeting where people can work on projects.
The second such meeting was tonight, and we discussed doing a group project together. We seem to have settled on the idea of building some “swarm robots” — robots that individually obey simple rules but in a group are able to perform some larger function. There is an example of this at http://swarmrobot.org