the somber funeral and bragging/showboating

The impression I had was that the mirror-faced cloaked robots were the altered former crew, and then there were the 100% robots that Reinhardt built, like Maximilian and the robots Vincent and Bob have shoot-offs with. The ones having the funeral were the mirror-faced ones, they were definitely hanging on to a human ritual. Vincent and Bob having personalities didn't seem that far a leap from HAL in 2001 or Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

V.I.N.CENT and B.O.B. were designed specifically for "Project Black Hole" to report back to Earth scientific data related to black hole event horizons. V.I.N.CENT mentions this tidbit just after Palomino's crew enters Cygnus for the first time. Since it would take radio signals years to reach Earth from the closest known Black Hole, an ESP link between robots and humans was established as being more efficient, with ESP apparently being a method of instantaneous communication.

I assume that to establish a theoretical ESP link with an organic mind capable of ESP, the robots were programmed with advanced AI similar to the ego/id of a human. Of course, this is completely silly and fictitious but it is just a movie after all. The two Earth robots certainly display a propensity for or at least an ability to emulate a wide emotional range. Emotions like pride, irritation, surprise, expressions of physical pain, sorrow and other emotions can be observed. This is weird contradiction though, given Alex Durant's stance on robotic emotion. If you remember, at dinner onboard Cygnus, Durant mocks the very idea that the humanoids running the ship would have any emotional programming/perception at all, as if no other robot of any design could either. It is a paradox that quality scriptwriting would have avoided.

-Rod