Observing this disagreement without having first read the article, you're coming off as unreasonable in your details, though your original criticism may make sense. Autonomy is not, in practice, a prerequisite for the label "robot", no matter how much we would like it to be (and I would like it to be). This is especially true of standins for dangerous operations. We all know that e.g. bomb disposal robots are robots in normal writing and normal conversation. It seems like a bad-faith nit-pick to assert otherwise.

Even if you disagree that this is the "common" understanding, the sarcastic exaggeration is meaningless.

I agree with another commenter, that a more reasonable criticism would be that it should be called a "remote controlled robot", rather than just a robot.