[Tom Bottiglieri]

This is almost certainly because the OS is using your wifi adaptor as the primary interface and routing all unknown destination packets (like mdns requests) out of that. When you specify the IP manually the packets are routed out ethernet, since you have an IP address in that subnet.

In Mac OS, there is a way to set service order of interfaces, so you can pick a default interface. I don't know how this works in windows. Why don't you hook up an internet enabled ethernet cable to the WAN port of your router and just join the robot's wireless network?