Robot Kid
A robot built to look and/or act like a child. A good number of these are boys, but there are many that are girls.
Possibly made as part of a Robo-Family, or to be taken care of as a child of a human family (possibly as a Replacement Goldfish for a lost child of the creator or if the creator can't have biological children). When the kid's mechanic serves as a mentor and emotional caretaker, he's a Fatherly Scientist (Motherly Scientist if it's a woman).
May fall into Really Seven Hundred Years Old or Older Than They Look unless the robot was very recently built. If they were built very recently, they might actually be Younger Than They Look instead.
Examples of Robot Kid include:
Anime and Manga
- Astro Boy. He's one of the Replacement Goldfish examples, but he also has combat abilities.
- Arale from Dr. Slump.
- Pino in Ergo Proxy.
- The main character of the short anime movie Hotori - Tada Saiwai o Koinegau is a little robot boy.
Comic Books
- A Creepy Child variant shows up in The Dark Knight Returns, where the Joker's bombs are sentient robot brats.
- Similar situation with Elsie Dee, created by Donald Pierce of the Hellfire Club to take out Wolverine. However, an assistant of Pierce's made her far more intelligent and sentient than Pierce intended, and she managed to get control of her systems and not blow up.
- The Beano had one, back in the late 30s early 40s, named Tin Can Tommy who in later strips gained a robot brother.
- Rusty of The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot.
Film
- David from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
- Daryl from DARYL.
Literature
- Pinocchio is something of a fantasy variation in that he's a wooden puppet, not a robot, and was carved from a talking piece of wood (novel) or was enchanted to be sentient (Disney film) rather than having AI.
Live-Action TV
- Vicki from Small Wonder.
- A villainous example occurs in Taiyou Sentai Sun Vulcan, where Black Magma builds a robot version of a man's dead daughter. The robot eventually disobeys the villains because they'd programmed it to view the man as its father. Later, they do it again, this time replacing a living boy with a robot duplicate.
Video Games
- Botley in Jump Start Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain.
- Roll from Mega Man and Rock/Mega Man himself (who was originally a replacement made for an Astro Boy game that never happened). There's also Protoman/Blues, who combines it with Aloof Big Brother.
- MOMO from Xenosaga, though she's more of an Artificial Human than a robot.
- The main character among others in Cave Story.
Web Comics
- Warbot in Warbot in Accounting once builds a small robot in an attempt to get a son. Hilarity Ensues.
- Wondermark has S.A.M.I.R, the Helpful Clockwork Boy, and Hubert, who becomes a "real boy". Though neither look particularly childlike, or human.
Western Animation
- Tinny Tim on Futurama
- Also Bender's son in the DVD movie Beast With a Billion Backs.
- Jimmy Neutron has Brobot, created to be a younger brother rather than a son to his creator.
- Jenny of My Life as a Teenage Robot, though as the name would imply she's a teenager rather than a young child. She also has "siblings"—earlier prototypes made by her "mother"—that are based on younger kids, however.
- There is also the fact that while Jenny is designed to look like a teenager, she is chronologically 5 years old—a fact that forced her to transfer to kindergarten in one episode.
- The titular character of the cartoon Robotboy
- There's also Robotgirl and Protoboy.
- Wheelie, the young autobot they find fending for himself with a slingshot on Quintessa in Transformers: The Movie. In subsequent episodes of the cartoon he would be paired with Daniel to make a Cute Kid And Robot pair.
- Sari Sumdac for the first two seasons of Transformers Animated is the Robot Girl variant. Its harder to tell because those seasons the 'bot in question is in its alt-mode, a human.
- Robot Jones of Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?.
- Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot. Rusty was not built as a family robot, though, unless all family robots fire energy beams from their hands and can fly around. Rusty, originally meant to replace the outdated Big Guy (who is actually a Humongous Mecha with a pilot inside, despite what the public believes). However, Rusty's childish demeanor and inexperience relegate him to the post of a sidekick, while the Big Guy still takes care of the big problems.
- Bobert in The Amazing World of Gumball.
Real Life
- CB2.
- Robot Cub, a robot 3-year-old designed to study cognition.
- Repliee R1, not to be confused with the Q1 which is a robot adult.