Cite?
Uh, well…Can I get back to you on that?
No rush.
I don’t get it. Elvis asked if Robot (LiS) can brew hooch like Robby (FP). Your response, however, speaks only to Robby’s hooch-brewing capability, which was correctly stipulated as given in the question.
I’m confused, too.
In many episodes, the visor clearly is a painted bannana clip.
OK, as long as we’re both confused.
Moving on, I’ve read that Plan 9 From Outer Space actually usedhubcaps as flying saucers, but I don’t believe it.
I can’t find the magazine but I have an issue of something or other dedicated to Ed Wood and the Depp film about him. According to that, Ed used generic UFO models he bought. The film Ed Wood, decided to use UFOs made of styrofoam plates and bowls instead.
It looks to me that the pilots in the airliner were sitting on folding chairs and holding dinner plates instead of control yokes. 
The article is misleading about the inspiration for HAL. The picture gives the impression that HAL’s bubble-eye was inspired by surveillance cameras placed around London. But back in the 1960s, surveillance cameras weren’t enclosed in the plasyic bubble-domes that are now ubiquitous (in fact, when I visited Dublin a few years ago, surveillance cameras WERE ubiquitous. But not one was in a bubble dome that I saw). In fact, the article linked to to justify the assertion has Clarke explcitly stating that he didn’t know where the image came from – the art department made it up.
I think it’s a bit overplaying Rabby’s roots, too. Robby didn’t “start out as a washing machine”, even if Kinoshita’s early work may have been on them (something hadn’t heard before). It only shows where his mechanical inspirations may have come from. I don’t see much resmblance, myself.
HAL is an acronym for Heuristically-designed Algorithm. Nothing to do with IBM.
Technically, this was mentioned in the book 2010 (no idea if it’s in the movie as I’ve never sen it), but only as a backronym - someone made a joke about how everyone said HAL was one step ahead of IBM. (I-1=H, B-1=A, M-1=L).
But I think Arthur C Clarke put that in only a an amusing aside after the similarity had been pointed out to him.
It’s in the novel 2001, which was released before the movie and, as far as I know, before anyone ever made the HAL<–>IBM connection.