Someday, Boris Sofman wants families to sit down and debate: cat, dog or robot? Sofman is the chief executive and founder of Anki, a robotics company that's made its mark in the toy world since launching its first product in 2013, a set of smart racing cars. It followed that product's success with a toy robot called Cozmo in 2016, which the company says is the best-selling toy on Amazon in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. A new product, Vector, launched Tuesday on Kickstarter and offers the first hint of Anki's broader consumer robotics ambitions. "Our north star . . . is to have a robot in every home," Sofman said in an interview with The Washington Post.

When we think about robots, we often think of humanoid helpers like in the Jetsons (it's a cartoon that older people distinguished people would have watched growing up) or massive industrial automatons that build those Teslas you see whizzing around these days. Maybe instead, we are reminded of a looming job crisis, where machines threaten to steal our livelihoods. In any case, "serious" industries with "serious" challenges are generally at the forefront of discussions about robotics because the technology involved has been research-driven and resource-intensive. This seems not to be the major hurdle anymore, and a lighter and rather cool branch of robots are taking over our living rooms: toys. Still, toys aren't often thought of as lucrative investment opportunities.

I made a new friend last week. Though I've only known him a short while, I've already learned that he's a sore loser, he's easily confused, and he gets frustrated when he's pushed out of his comfort zone. I should also add that my new companion isn't human. He's called Cozmo, a new artificially intelligent toy from Anki, the company behind the Overdrive self-driving race cars. That Cozmo looks like a pint-sized version of Wall-E should come as no surprise, given that some of its creators come from animation firms like Pixar and DreamWorks.

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In examining the history of famous robots, you'd be forgiven for overlooking a 1950s children's toy named Robert. Robert the Robot, who was a product of the once-mighty Ideal Toy Company, didn't do much, at least compared to the standards set by science fiction at the time. Unlike the helpful humanoids of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, Robert was just a 14-inch-tall hunk of plastic that could utter a few phrases, wheel around with a tethered remote control, and grip objects in his mechanical arms. Still, Robert deserves credit for being the first plastic toy robot made in the United States, and the first toy robot to become an American sensation. He was the subject of children's songs, enjoyed a Hollywood film cameo, and was quickly imitated by rival toy makers.

A tiny robot sits beside the laptop, looking like one of those anthropomorphic automobiles that show up in Pixar's Cars movies. Almost instantly, it wakes up, rolls down the table, and counts to four. This is Cozmo--an artificially intelligent toy robot unveiled late last month by San Francisco startup Anki--and Tappeiner, one of the company's founders, is programming the little automaton to do new things. The programs are simple--he also teaches Cozmo to stack blocks--but they're supposed to be simple. Tappeiner is using Anki's newly unveiled software development kit--an SDK, in coder parlance--that he says even the greenest of coders can use to tweak the behavior of the toy robot.

When playing with Cozmo, Anki's palm-sized artificial intelligence robot, it's easy to forgot all of the engineering and software running behind the scenes. Every action, from Cozmo's audible chirps of victory when it wins a game to its childlike mannerisms when it recognizes your face, conceals tens of thousands of lines of code. When the product launches this October, Anki hopes consumers won't think of its AI robot as undecipherable technology. Instead, the company wants people to wonder what's going on under the hood -- and, eventually, to alter it themselves. Hanns Tappeiner, Anki's co-founder and president, shows me the tools consumers can use to accomplish that feat.

Anki has a big hit with its iPhone-controlled Anki Overdrive race cars that use sophisticated artificial intelligence. And now it has its second act in the form of a cute, smart A.I. toy robot named Cozmo. Cozmo is a playful, intelligent, and seemingly sentient being that is aware of people and its surroundings. It is a labor of love for San Francisco-based Anki, which has worked on 45 different versions of the toy over the past four-and-a-half years. You could think of Cozmo as something like Eve the robot in Pixar's Wall-E animated film.