The company has opted to take the crowdfunding route to fund production of its latest bot – called Rvr – which has been designed to be tweaked and hacked by adult hobbyists and young roboticists alike.

The Rvr rolling robot platform is Sphero's response to feedback it's received over the years, with customers asking for future products to be able to tackle different kinds of surfaces, respond to voice commands, serve as home security patrol, be a battle bot when needed, and more.

This platform doesn't meet all feature requests out of the box, but has been designed so that users of all skill levels can pretty much make it do whatever they want it to do.

It works with Sphero's Edu app, and can be driven around straight away using joystick controls within the app. Once it's been taken for its first test drive, users can then dive into coding using the same app in an environment based on Scratch visual programming language.