One of the books I was obsessed with from my small town public library was simply titled "Robots" and it had some of these, including Odex1[0] which I still think is one of the cooler old-style robot designs, and AROK[1] which is the best, objectively, suck it Boston Dynamics and Elon. Unfortunately it's impossible to Google that book now.
I was obsessed with the Omnibot 2000, and for the brief and terrible time I was a Scout, I wanted to build the Gizmo robot in Boy's Life[2] but it was just a trash can with a motor. It bothered me to no end that Androbot[3,4] had no arms. The only real robot-type thing I actually had was an Armatron (the grey version.)
[0]https://www.theoldrobots.com/odex.html
[1]https://www.blackgate.com/2019/07/31/arok-the-robot/
[2]https://www.theoldrobots.com/GismoRobot.html
[3]https://www.theoldrobots.com/bob.html
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topo_%28robot%29
I miss when the future was fun. Now we're going to get robots but they'll be designed to put us out of work or shoot us dead in the streets, and none of them will look nearly as interesting.
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