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I think the Honda one has an omnidirectional wheel similar to this except motorized to allow lateral stability as well:
http://www.robotshop.ca/Images/big/en/vex-robotics-large-omni-directional-wheel-kit.jpg

~$200, but a Vex robot kit http://www.robotshop.ca/vexplorer-vexblue.html A vex robot or lego mindstorms kit is cheap when you factor in how many hours he'll use it and what he'll learn from it. The arduino boards mentioned above are also a good suggestion, but for books I'd start him out on Forrest Mims' electronics books and get a copy of Paul Scherz's "Electronics for Inventors" 2nd Ed. Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics" is a bit advanced for him.

Check it out....
There are multiple robots from white box robotics that make use of Linux..
They sure aren't cheap, though.

This robot is maybe made by Heathkit (a subsidary of Zenith, which is really LG, at least in the US for TVs and such), but the design is Whitebox. The top of the line Linux one is $1000 less than the windows version:

      http://www.robotshop.ca/home/suppliers/white-box-robotics-en/white-box-robotics-linux-914-pc-bot.html

It does seem the Heathkit is out of touch, but it is more likely some school administration that would want to buy some of these. Since the administrators don't do any real computer work, other than write Word documents, and do budgets on Excel, to them every nail needs the M$ hammer. They want to teach a software class, well, the old M$ hammer works good for them, they will stick with it. Even many teachers are afraid of anything they can't buy at WorstBuy or the Apple store.

IF these are reliable, and white box can take care of them, then confidence may grow, and people will buy the linux versions to replace the buggy M$ ones. It could happen.

Flying car. Robot servant. Jacques Cousteau. Nuclear Power (Quote: "The provincial government had decided to see if private managers could do a better job running a major part of the nuclear fleet that supplies almost half of Ontario's electricity [emph. mine]).".

Expecting a perfect match to prediction is a physicist's game at this point. Everyone else has to deal with macroscopic error values.

What I think is that however it does not look to me that robotics as an industry could ever enjoy the _same_ degree of modularization enjoyed by the computer industry.

Take a look at the LynxMotion Servo Erector Set. Modular robot kits are already here, and we're not taking about Lego.

This looks a lot like the Kondo KHR-1 mentioned a while ago here, but a bit more advanced. Looks like some pretty nice enhancements, though, I do agree with a lot of other /.'ers in that I would like more information.