How a $31.95 Robotic Arm at Radio Shack in the 1980s helped inspire today’s Pioneers

In the early 1980s,  Radio Shack store shelves, filled with electronic kits and handheld games, were a gold mine for curious-minded children. One unforgettable toy, the Armatron, a tabletop robotic arm, gave many children of a generation their first real encounter with robotics.

Genius Design Without Electronics

On its box, the Armatron was described as a robot-like arm to aid young masterminds in scientific and laboratory experiments. It had a bright orange claw, twin joysticks, and a constant whir of gears. The device allowed users to twist, lift, grab, and rotate objects as if they were piloting an industrial machine. It had an affordable price tag of $31.95 (around $96 today) and was featured at Robotics Age magazine in its November/December 1982 issue for offering capabilities usually found in much more expensive experimental arms.

The toy was made a reality by a team led by Hiroyuki Watanabe, who has his name in many patent filings, working at Japan’s Tomy Company, a toy company currently named Takara Tomy. There was no circuit board, microchip, sensor, or anything electronic at all inside the toy’s sturdy plastic shell, but just a single three-volt DC motor driving a complex network of gears, a switch, and a battery case. Watanabe, now retired from Tomy, never studied engineering at a university, but attended a technical high school. He fell in love with bulldozers when he worked earlier at Komatsu, a Japanese manufacturer of heavy equipment, including excavators, bulldozers, and forklifts. He joined Tomy in 1974 because he wanted to make toys that moved.

Reflecting on his work, Watanabe said, “Constraints force creativity. That’s where the joy of invention begins.”

One day, Watanabe’s boss handed him a newspaper clipping showing a mechanical arm delicately holding an egg, which became the seed of everything for him. Early prototypes that were designed by his team relied on six toggle switches. However, Watanabe, inspired by his hobby of flying radio-controlled helicopters and experience at Komatsu, redesigned his version around two twistable joysticks, doubling the motion control and allowing six degrees of freedom. His breakthrough made the arm move like its industrial versions.  The faux rubber tubes he used gave his design a much more authentic factory-robot appearance.

From Toy Store to Tech Labs

Afterwards, the Armatron attracted attention not just from children, but also from researchers, engineers, robotics labs, and university professors, who were fascinated by such a simple mechanism that could perform so many tasks with just one motor. It was regarded as a mechanical metaphor for efficiency and ingenuity by the adults, but for some young children who owned the toy, it was a career starter.

“Just like the Armatron arm, not everything in robotics is complicated. Sometimes the simplest design is the best,” explained Carter Hamaway ‘27, a Pine Crest student fascinated by the toy’s design philosophy. 

A New York City boy named Adam Borrell spent hours playing with the demo version of the Armatron at a neighborhood Radio Shack store. While attending graduate school many years later, he had a chance to take apart a broken Armatron and was surprised to see the simplicity of one motor controlling complexity in a mechanical choreography hidden inside the toy. He later joined Boston Dynamics, helping to design machines like the humanoid Atlas and the dog-like Spot.

Eric Paulos, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, still has his properly working Armatron from his childhood. In his university lab, he channels his experience with the toy into his teaching philosophy. Students in his courses design robots using cardboard, rubber bands, or Play-Doh, exploring movement through constraints rather than through expensive hardware. According to his teaching philosophy, constraints don’t limit creativity, but they define it.

From Analog to Digital Age- Lessons to be Learned

As artificial intelligence and machine learning dominate robotics headlines of our time, the Armatron stands as a nostalgia for many professionals who have contributed to innovations of the current digital age. They have experienced and learned from a toy, how a purely simplistic mechanical toy could teach young minds how motion, leverage, and design interact. 

Reflecting on how innovation works, Ms. Stephanie Jean-Philippe, Middle School Innovation Specialist at Pine Crest, noted that “In the world of AI, it is important to be reminded that not all aspects of innovation are made up of complete algorithms and advanced robotics. Small, meaningful changes are just as impactful and will often inspire the next generation.”

More than four decades after the Armatron first appeared in Radio Shack stores, it remains a symbol of curiosity and inspiration for innovation for many members of an older generation. For future young engineers, it provides a lesson that technology’s true power is not only in code or algorithms of the Artificial Intelligence age we live in, but also in imagination guided by physical design that will drive future inventions.

Sources

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/17/1114456/toy-armatron-modern-robotics-ai-nostalgia/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armatron