Seita Koike from Tokyo City University describes Mugbot as a primitive reference design for a social robot, but there’s something very charming about this robot platform made from dollar store items and open source electronics. Mugbot is controlled by cell phone through a web socket server and is driven by an off-the-shelf combination of Arduino/XBee/Motor Shield along with a Bluetooth speaker for playing a synthesized voice sent from the computer. A nice project.