oh boy, relevant patents are expired, there's a hacker community and everything.

It would be fun to build a modern version of this, with an Arduino or Rpi or something providing the "brains", and with some input sensors (ultrasonic distance sensor, camera, etc). But instead of just having the input buttons on top, you could also program it over the network (or USB) using a real programming language.

I guess that wouldn't be much different though, than some of the other low-end experimental robotics platforms that are out there?