How to I give my robot brains?

Giving to a robot a "brain" is not that simple. You should restrict his "knowledge" to a limited set of situations and choose the main behavior that you want for the robot to accomplish.

Then when you have the basic behavior coded inside your robot build some add-on features on top of that basic feature.

Always check if the basic feature is working properly when you add new things on top, especially when dealing with interrupt.

Good luck anyway. But forget about the "brain"... A.I. (artificial intelligence) is very high tech stuff, you should take specialized courses to understand properly what it is all about.

Hire a zombie.  It will find brains.  The hard part is getting the zombie to bring the brains back to you

Brain : depends on what you would like your bot to do. (Search n Destroy humans )

If you want the brain to be responsive to surrounding changes, microcontroller+ sensors will be fine.

If you want the brain to be packed with heavy computing or video or image processing stuff then processors will do.

when you say brain these days AI mostly comes to mind (purely sci-fi impact).

Not sure if you need a brain like Transcendence

you may need to write complex coding depending on your requirement and may need to think on below stuff like :

- how to give reasoning to your robot

- how the robot will plan to deter obstacles and judge environment based on partial visibility (check opencv).

- how the robot perceives the environment (is it hot outside, raining outside , what ever it is blah blah blah ...)

- how it plans its next move, whether its a if-else algo or its something different based on its some AI algorithm or from stored data sets.

If its a robot you need to find tune not only on inputs(sensors) but also on its movements (actuators).

Again there are intelligent projects like the blue brain project (crazy ppl trying to understand and emulate their own mind).

Infact these things are redefining and setting new standards on what we call Engineering.

Regards

Tushar

Any microcontroller or computer can be programmed to learn and make decisions that could be classed as thinking. Of course, the more complex the thinking behaviour you want to implement, the more power the computer will need. So choose the maximum computer power you are comfortable programming and start figuring out how to make the computer make decisions differently depending on what they have already "experienced" or recorded or even just depending on feedback from sensors. Then build a robot chassis to carry the computer. As you learn more about the rules and logic involved in this type of programming, you will be able to expand the "thinking" capabilities of your program.

Is it a good idea to use an android phone as  a brain and have arduino control sensors, motors, etc? I mean, the logic and decisions will be done by an android phone.

If you want to make very complex task you need a microcontroller(because AI is very difficult) You should know progrmming(advanced) and if program is lenghty, use I2C

-Arduino Playground - I2C

-I2C between Arduino's 

Thanks everyone for commenting

It really depends on how smart you want it. You can have a look at these:

Robot Operating System - http://www.ros.org/

Learning Machine Learning and AI - seek for free courses at https://www.coursera.org/

Control of robots is a good start that I would definitely recommend - https://www.coursera.org/course/conrob

You can use OpenCV to make your robot see http://opencv.org/

Aforge is a nice .Net library with some features and is easy to start with http://www.aforgenet.com/aforge/framework/