Anyone who read Alfred Slote’s book My Robot Buddy as a kid has probably dreamt ever since of having his or her very own man-machine pal. Who ever had a better friend than the robot Jack gets for his 10th birthday, Danny One?

As you might remember, Danny One looks and sounds just like a human kid. Except for his stiff-legged robot walk, people can’t tell the ‘bot from the boy—and Jack exploits this confusion when he walks without bending his knees.

It never bothered us at the time, but thinking about it now, it’s ridiculous that we accepted this proposition: The robot manufacturers of the future had supposedly mastered such subtleties as the replication of human skin, with its fine textures. They duplicated the unmistakable look of the natural human eye, with its delicate, precise movements. But somehow they just weren’t quite able to figure out how to make their automations’ knees bend?

Seriously, the animatronic Presidents at Disney World have bending knees, and no one’s going to confuse them with living specimens of homo sapiens.
How complicated can a knee be? Isn’t it just a hinge? Danny One interacts with people, solves problems, has a winning personality… he’s a thousand times more advanced than the Honda Human, a thousand times more realistic-looking than the RealDoll, and a thousand times better company than Teddy Ruxpin. But even all those lesser inventions have knee joints.

Actually, it seems like a stiff-legged walk would be harder to engineer. How does Danny One not fall over? How does he get up steps?

Ah, it’s a waste of time to wonder. It’s easy to forget, in these days of The O’Reilly Factor for Kids and the gay wizards’ rights movement that 1975 was a simpler time for children’s literature. We didn’t enjoy the book any less for its implausibility. And it’s easy to poke fun at someone for mis-predicting the future of technology.

After all, who, back then, would have imagined a robo-companion as strange-looking as Roboquad?

This creepy little bug suffers no deficiency of articulation points in his legs. Even so, no one’s going to mistake him for human—or even for a member of any other native Earth species. But who cares? With its advanced artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art sensors, Roboquad can explore and interact with his environment and the people in it. And personality? You can adjust Roboquad’s behavior with his 68-function remote control, even setting him on “High Aggression mode” to make him act angrier, which sounds like kind of a nightmare to us, but whatever you’re into.

Roboquad is your real robot buddy—play with him for just a few minutes and you’ll realize what we should have understood instantly about My Robot Buddy when we read it way back when: When it comes to robots, the more humanlike they are, the better suited they are to science fiction for young readers. In the real world, we want our robot buddies as robot-y as they can get. That’s Roboquad.

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