After the video game crash of 1983 and its debilitating effect on the nascent home electronics industry, the Omnibot faded away but it was revived in the early 2000s.
Losing the remote control unit for an Omnibot meant that the robot was virtually useless outside of the clock and cassette deck based functions.
The OOM's 'eyes' illuminated rather like car headlights via two small 3V lightbulbs, and a third flashing light behind a lens strip was used to visually represent a 'mouth' à la Verbot (#5401).
Custom manufactured in Japan and South Korea, it was essentially the same as Tomy TTC's OOM but with its cassette control panel replaced with that of the standard Omnibot unit (#5402).
Simultaneously released by Radio Shack as the Robie Jr., Omnibot Jr. included a microphone on either side of the robot's head that allowed it to hear an ultrasonic sound emitted by the remote controller.
Disadvantages common to the Verbot were that it was quite noisy, reprogramming was necessary every time the robot was powered up again, and as with all of the Omnibot series, its white plastic body would turn yellow if left in the sun.
As with most Omnibots, losing the remote meant the robot could not be used to full capacity, but some hobbyists have modified cheap 1980s walkie-talkies for inputting voice commands.
Commonly added features are IR Sensors, video cameras, speech recognition chips, stronger motors, microcontrollers, sonars and other advanced enhancements that would not have been possible in the 80s.
[5] The Robot inexplicitly appears in the "present day" settings, dancing next to Robin when she sings "The Beaver Song" at the Hoser Hut[6] and (in a deleted scene) "Let's Go to the Mall" at her own wedding reception.
("μ" is the Greek letter "mu" symbolizing micron, referring to the specs of the servo motors) in Japan and simply "i-SOBOT" in the U.S. market.
i-SOBOT was scheduled to go on sale in Japan in October 2007 (Japanese language with blue and white color), but an English language, black and grey version went on sale first in the U.S., in September, 2007. i-SOBOT, which has been certified by Guinness World Records as "the world's smallest humanoid robot in production" is equipped with 17 proprietary servo-motors and can be controlled by an IR remote controller and also via voice commands.