Daniel Dennett has been looking for information about Tati for a while now:
 are some of his photos
 said:"Reward for information! I found it in an antique shop in Paris. It was made in France in the 1950s, so I have named it Tati, in honor of Jacques Tati (whose classic film Mon Oncle captures the same era with the same ingenious and humorous use of technology). I do not know who made Tati, or why, and would be pleased to receive any substantiated information about its provenance"And now I found a post on HN that made some progress, alas confirmation is needed: correspondent has told me that Tati (my name for it, of course, not the name its creator chose, certainly) was commissioned by Prince Louis de Broglie, the Belgian physicist and Nobel laureate, for his granddaughter in Paris. She fell on hard times and sold it to an antique dealer. Could be, but my efforts to confirm the story have not yet born fruit."On a personal note, this is such a magical story that I may start working on cute SBC + GNU/Linux cats.In case you missed it, there is another robotic dog story  but this one is a real tragedy, and a different story.