Dr Mark Tilden was hot property yesterday.
The ex-Nasa scientist and creator of the award-winning Robosapien robot was at Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology to promote his new toy, an electronic dinosaur called Roboreptile.
Thirty small fans from Freemans Bay primary school clamoured for his attention and a turn at pushing the buttons on one of his remote-controlled creations.
"Nasa wanted to give me $1 million to build one robot, now I get $1 to build a million robots," he joked.
Roboreptile is a departure from Robosapien. For one thing, it's a dinosaur rather than a humanoid.
"When I was a kid, I wanted two things: a dinosaur and a robot." His childhood dreams were the building blocks for the popular toys, based on a technology he invented called "biomorphics". The trick behind biomorphics is size.
"The brains of these things are no bigger than calculators," he said.
There was chaos as the children were divided into teams to race robots from Dr Tilden's collection.
Paul Swadel, one of the parents supervising, said his son Felix loved the Roboreptile.
Some of the children were having a reptile-humanoid fight.
"We got three and they're fighting," said 5-year-old Felix.
Bailey, 6, was making her Robosapien dance.
There would be no Roboreptile in Felix's Christmas stocking, though. Mr Swadel thinks they are a bit too expensive at $169 each. The latest Robosapien sells for $349.
Dr Tilden's robots do not have labels or corporate sponsorship.
"They don't even have official names, I let the kids name them," he said.
The simplest robot in the range has 40 functions. "Children go online and find cheat sheets," said Dr Tilden.
"I thought, why shouldn't a robot be as good as a video game?"
Class teacher Marion Nicolson said it was "nice to see" the kids "so excited".
"They've been looking forward to this all day," she said.
A rousing cheer came from the crowd as a Roboreptile crawled its way to the finish line of the race - the nose of a photographer.
"Fifty per cent of toys are sold to grownups and the other 50 per cent to parents who play with it when their kids are in bed," said Dr Tilden.
The robots are manufactured in southern China.
Dr Tilden's next creations will be "bigger and better humanoids" that can play MP3s and help in the house.
Children take to inventors' Jurassic lark
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