Perhaps the new Vector 'bot (which appears to be almost identical in all aspects as Anki's first revision of this bot, Cozmo) works fine but I won't risk $250 to find out. ("fool me once...") You see, Cozmo was plagued with hardware issues ("connection lost") making it unusable. My suspicion is a battery unable to satisfy the current draw, or a voltage regulator not up to the task, causing a brownout and CPU crash. By the way, no user-servicable parts, and Anki will not sell a replacement battery.
I bought mine for me and my kids to play around with programming -- it was a total waste of money. I could never get it running for more than a few minutes at a time, and startup might require a half-hour of attempts (replace on charger, move arm to boot up, reboot, connect to cozmo network, connect app, cozmo wakes up ... and crashed after a couple seconds.) Once it does connect it may run for 20 minutes or 2 minutes before quitting suddenly. And, while running, it's great! Cute as can be. But product reviews (amazon, etc.) are full of this complaint so many others have experienced it.
There is a Python SDK available for it so you can fully control every aspect of Vector: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzTIp2tHwgs