Petoi Bittle is like a palm-sized programmable Boston Dynamics robot for the home

If your main concern with Boston Dynamics robots isn’t their terrifying nature but their portability, you’re not going to resist adding a Petoi Bittle (£160) to your home. The dinky robot rocks up as a plastic kit that takes an hour or so to make. It’ll then skitter across your desk and up slopes on spring-loaded legs that give it plenty of expression, like a puppy, or let it right itself with a weirdly alien flipping motion, not like a puppy. As you might expect, your plastic pal is extensible. The custom Arduino board at the heart of the unit gives Petoi Bittle its balance; there’s infra-red for triggering movements; and you can programme the thing in a range of languages, in an attempt to have it do your bidding. Also, you get little plastic heads, which perform the dual function of holding clip-on sensors for things like motion tracking and making your programmable pet look less like a miniaturised robot hell-bent on the eradication of humanity.