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.