It would be a massive understatement to suggest that robot toys are a mixed bag. They largely get the looks right, but brains are another thing altogether. Look at the time and money that went into building the first Roomba, for example, and it becomes very clear why the dream of ubiquitous home robot still seems like a lifetime away.
Just ahead of the holidays, I got a tinge of nostalgia from robot toys of yore. A friend told me they’d picked up a Roboraptor for a child in their life. I naturally asked, “they still make Roboraptor?” Granted, that’s probably not the first thing you want to hear after spending $70 on what you’d thought was a bleeding edge robot toy.