Although an Arduino or other microcontroller platform is designed to follow a certain sequence of events, with some thought you can create a device that can have a wide varierty of reponses to external stimuli and even have a little bit of personality. This type of device has been achieved by Evan Frazier whose "Brobot" has a range of emotions which can be articulared with various output devices.
With LED matrices for eyes, servo horns for eyelids, and his head mounted on a pan and tilt base, the Brobot can move about and also express emotions via physical actions. Furthermore it can detect the presence of others nearby with an ultrasonic distance sensor - or be controlled remotely via Bluetooth and an Android device. For an excellent explanation and demonstration, view the following video:
To learn more about Brobot and to recreate your own version, visit Evan's Instructable page. And for more, we're on facebook, twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
If you found the project above interesting - but not sure how to start with Arduino, then the best way to learn is with our Experimenter's Kit for Arduino:
The package includes a wide variety of parts, sensors and modules including: a servo motor, lights, buttons, switches, sound, sensors, breadboard, wires and more. Furthermore a Freetronics Eleven Arduino-compatible board is included to make this an extensive hobby experimenter, inventor and starter kit. However we don't leave you alone to figure it all out, included is a great project and instruction booklet, plus access to a supporting web page and software examples. In other words - this is everything you need to get started for a fun range of electronics and Arduino related projects! So to get started or for more information and to order, check out the product page.
