We have lift-off.

Lo these many months I have searched in vain.
Actually, I finally found what I was looking for: fun stuff for my son's 6th birthday party. As any mother knows, you start with a theme to narrow down what sort of party favors, games, etc., you are going to try to have at a birthday party.
I did not realize that in deciding on a theme of 'robots' that I would be narrowing these down to about 'nil'. For weeks I browsed the web surprised at the lack of robot stuff at the party-type web sites.

It took a while but I finally found the following, for those interested:
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/tproll/robot/
This craft was REALLY fun, although it didn't look like much when I first viewed the web page. I think the trick with a group of kids is to have everything ready and multiples of scissors, glue, googley eyes, etc. Also have some extra aluminum & rolls in case someone messes up. Some of the kids made many-eyed and many-legged versions which looked great!
I found silver pipe cleaners that worked well for most robots, but provided a few pink ones for the little girls I knew would be there.

I will try to post a pic of the completed bots in future.

Also: www.robotoys.com rocks for less expensive items including these pop-out and assemble mini robots which make great party favors:
http://www.robotoys.com/st_prod.html?p_prodid=1277&sid=8Zh3tD1UtCOC6bo-31106016841.83

There are also larger paper models that could work as gifts for the birthday boy or as prizes during the party.

I found wind-up robots here:
http://www.robotstore.com/store/product.asp?pid=409&catid=1634

The robotstore is a great site. They also have paper models and LOTS of small robot kits starting around twenty bucks; I got my son this wall-hugging mouse robot kit which he really likes -
http://www.robotstore.com/store/product.asp?pid=28&catid=11

It works well, once we cleaned the dust off the baseboard! The instructions are mostly in some asian language (Japanese, I think) the diagrams are good and it took about 1.5 hours to complete, for first-timers (me & my son).

Also on the birthday theme, I was able to come up with some coloring pages of robots and that kept the kids busy during the first few minutes where not too many folks had arrived yet. Finally, for the cake I decided to do cupcakes in silvery-aluminum cup cake liners and topped each one with a small drawing of a robot that I taped onto a colored toothpick. They looked really cute and the kids enjoyed them.