Almost half the children questioned in a recent survey said they worried about how much their parents spent on them at Christmas and would rather the money was saved for when they were older. They were lying: most children will kill for Robosapien, the £80 must-have toy of the moment.

Adult stomachs churned with battery acid when Jonathan Ross, the chat show host, sadistically spelt out this ultimatum: “Kids, if you wake up on Christmas Day and you don’t have a Robosapien under the Christmas tree, your parents don’t love you.”

The entertaining seasonal spectacle of parents in headless-chicken mode is with us once again as stores report shortages of Robosapien, the mesmerising black-and-white pseudo-human. Forget Barbie, who has been karate-chopped off the top spot by a multi-purpose mechanical minion that has sold 2m worldwide and grabbed batches of international toy awards.

It is just possible that you haven’t seen this robot with attitude sitting on the sofa with Richard & Judy, appearing on Top of the Pops or filmed busking his way around London’s Covent Garden collecting money in a plastic cup.

You may not have heard of the fanatic who bought 20 Robosapiens and programmed them to salute all his Darth Vader dolls. Or the man who got 50 of them to pull him on a skateboard as he whipped them.

Robosapien is a 14in-tall automaton whose seven motors enable him to carry out 67 fluent actions, operated by remote control. Press the “on” switch on his back and his eyes flash red, he stretches, wobbles, bends forward — and then farts. Thanks to sensors he can walk and run on different surfaces, navigate a maze, pick up and throw objects as well as perform 180-degree turns, boogie, fight, snore and burp.

He was invented by Mark Tilden, a 43-year-old British computer expert who designed robots for Nasa’s programme to explore Mars and now stands to make £20m from Robosapien mania. “Nasa gave me a million bucks to build one robot; for Robosapien (the manufacturer) gave me one buck to build a million robots,” he said.

The beauty of the beast is that its antics and antisocial noises send children into fits of laughter, while intriguing more technically minded adults. This cross-marketing means that Hamleys, the London toy shop, expects to sell 180,000 this Christmas, while the online Gadget Shop has sold 20,000 to adults.

At first sight Robosapien seems to be bucking the trend for retro toys such as Scrabble, Cluedo, Buckaroo and Mouse Trap. Huge sales of traditional games and toys — even chopper bikes — suggest a backlash against computer games and high-tech toys. Parents seem to be trying to recapture the Christmases of their youth.

Yet Robosapien is a throwback to the cheap Japanese toy robots of the 1950s. Apt to walk off tables and smash on the floor, they never fulfilled the potential of intelligent tame robots foreshadowed in the 1956 cult movie Forbidden Planet, in which Robby the Robot not only travelled at high speed but could replicate bottles of whisky at will.

While not yet capable of achieving the latter, Tilden’s creation is light years ahead of those prototypes. His breakthrough was to introduce what he calls a “nervous network” driven by a computer only as powerful as a pocket calculator and connected to sensors all over the robot.

Tilden’s other innovation was to achieve balance by shaping the robot into two triangles, one balanced on top of the other and enabling each to stabilise the other if there is a shift in stability. For instance, when Robosapien lifts its left leg, the upper body compensates by lowering its left shoulder.

In marketing terms, Robosapien cannot stand still without being surpassed by superior rivals already in the pipeline. Mike Hawley, an expert on toys at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: “All that mechanical know-how has fallen into place and there are plenty of companies building them now.”