The Tekkotsu project seeks to make sophisticated robots easily programmable by undergraduates or high school students. To get there, robots will have to become a lot smarter, so they can be instructed at a more abstract level. In designing suitable high level primitives, we can draw inspiration from ideas in cognitive science, as I will illustrate with Tekkotsu's "dual-coding" vision system. We have also been designing new, open source hardware platforms such as the Chiara (see videos at Chiara-Robot.org) that can implement advanced perception, navigation, and manipulation primitives at an affordable price.