6 Robot Picture Books That Will Give You All the Feels

Boy and Bot, by Ame Dyckman and Dan Yaccarino
Kids and robots can become the best of friends, as Ame Dyckman shows in her sweet story of a boy who meets a robot in the woods. Even if they’re totally sympatico, though, it doesn’t mean they completely understand each other’s ways. When robot’s power button switches off, the boy thinks he has malfunctioned. And when the boy falls asleep for the night, the robot thinks he’s turned off. It takes the robot’s inventor to sort the misunderstanding out—and avert a potentially disastrous boy battery change.

Oh No!: Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World, by Mac Barnett and Dan Santat
Of course, as 2001 (and 2016, for that matter) taught us, robots aren’t always benign. Mac Barnett captures the mayhem that ensues when an ambitious young science fair champion builds a robot that wins her the grand prize, but turns out to have some significant flaws.  As the girl’s enormous, laser-eyed robot rampages through the city, she realizes she shouldn’t have given it the power “to control dogs’ minds” and that she should have programmed it with a way to follow her commands. She decides to fight science with science to get the robot back under control.

Curious Robot on Mars, by James Duffett-Smith and Bethany Straker
Robots are useful not just for friendship and for winning science fair prizes, but also for exploring distant planets. In 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars to search for life. Duffett-Smith imagines the rover as a robot named Curious who gets lonely being 100 million miles away from home, but finds friendship with some other lost-in-space creatures—Laika, the first dog in space, and Sputnik 2, the satellite that carried him. 

Little Robot, by Ben Hatke
In this charming graphic novel for older readers, a box containing a robot bounces off a delivery truck and is discovered by a girl with few financial resources—she lives in a trailer park and has no shoes—but with abundant imagination. She teaches the robot how to skip stones and search for mushrooms in the forest—all while the duo is pursed by a huge robot who wants to return the little robot to its home.

Love, Z, by Jessie Sima
A little robot named Z discovers a message in a bottle that reads “Love, Beatrice.” Z is perplexed—what does ‘love’ mean? When he asks his “old, rusty” robot parents what love means, they reply, “Does Not Compute.” So Z sets out on a mission to find the answer to this question.

Robot In Love by T.L. McBeth
Another robot investigates the concept of love in this new picture book by T.L. McBeth. “When a shiny, beautiful stranger catches robot’s eye, he knows she’s the one,” the story begins. But, as is typical in love, not all goes smoothly. Is the object of robot’s affection—who isn’t revealed until the end—even capable of returning his ardor? At any rate, she’s got robot twitterpated, as Thumper would say, jumping in puddles and distracted with thoughts of her shiny self.