Here is where the robot is controlled.
The choice of the hardware brain (some board) and the software (Arduino or Python etc).
Most projects of a humanoid or outdoor roving robot form would use an Arduino or Raspberry pi.
Some may require several of these.
Some pros don’t consider those two choices to be less than professional and prefer to use an embedded system board of some kind.
Here are some quick options for what one could use for the hardware part of the robots brain
- an Arduino
- a Raspberry Pi
- Beaglebone Black
- Pololu
- Parallax board
- STM32
- Propeller, PicAxe, Make, Stamp
- Embedded system
- Teensy (from 3dMakerWorld) James Bruton sometimes uses them
- Full Windows or Mac computer
- Nvidia Jetson (to develop AI applications)
- a brick from a Lego Mindstorm or a brick from a Meccanoid 2 foot robot
- old school like Wowwee Toys “Robosapien” BEAM electronic style no computer robot by Mark Tilden
Now the Arduino is only a microcontroller while the Raspberry Pi is a full blown computer basically that will run a version of Linux like Raspbian or Ubuntu but not Windows or Mac Os.
They can both hook up servos and sensors but the Arduino is easier to work with and designed more for simple creation of robots and the hooking up of electronic parts.
The Raspberry Pi can also make robots and more in that you could add a Raspberry Pi camera to it or connect with Twitter and other more complex things.
The Arduino does not need an operating system but must be plugged into a computer to write the code whereas the Raspberry Pi must have an operating system installed and then you write the code on it.
One could opt for a more powerful Teensy 4.1 for some projects which is what James Bruton used for his recent 2021 open source walking dog.
The Teensy 4.0 had this power in it. An ARM Cortex-M7 processor at 600MHz, with an NXP iMXRT1062 chip.
One could use one of Nvidia’s products like the Jetson Nano if one was looking at adding some type of deep learning to it.
The software you use could be anything like Python or C/C++ etc.
You could use some of the control software which could make it much easier to move your robots limbs like the software ARC from EZ Robot or the MRL language from the InMoov 3d printed robot from Paris.
Hanson has some kind of newly released open source software that you could look into.