This actually pretty neat! $18 is insanely low, I'd make this for my nephews and godson. Any way to get them working with scratch or similar graphical programming "language"?
The software stack for this robot is based on ROS, and there is an existing Scratch extension to connect with ROS[1]. You'd have to write some additional code specific to this robot but it should be doable using that project as a starting point.
[1] https://github.com/Affonso-Gui/scratch3-ros-vm