Shameless plug, but... I was frustrated by the lack of affordable, expandable walking robots, so I've been working on one of my own http://www.redrobotics.co

Shameless plug, but... I was frustrated by the lack of affordable, expandable walking robots, so I've been working on one of my own http://www.redrobotics.co http://www.redrobotics.co Not for sale yet, but I'm starting to run workshops locally and the plan is to crowdfund in the early spring with a target price of about £70/$100. It'll work standalone but can hold a Raspberry Pi or Arduino for expandability. I think legged/armed robots can be a lot more engaging than buggy robots, and open up some interesting avenues for creating motions and thinking about multi degree-of-freedom limbs, but things like Robosapian are just toys, and the $400 hobby robots can get boring quickly (e.g. adding a camera is difficult). If you have access to a 3D printer there are some interesting open source robot projects at the moment - for example Poppy: https://www.poppy-project.org/ https://www.poppy-project.org/ for which you can start by just building a torso