If you hade the time and money, how would you construct the scariest robot possible?
I think I'd go for a sugary cute doll robot, stuffed with hidden evil electronics :) Using a tiny camera and face regognition, the robot would wait idly until there's only one person nearby and then slowly turn it's head and eyes to look at him/her. Unless it turned out too cheesy the robot would also say stuff like "seven days" (and because of the face regognition it could maintain individual counters for it's victims) or just laugh diabolically.
It would need some servos so it could move about at night, but nothing advanced like biped walking. Just enough to crawl a meter or turn around so that every now and then you'd find it somewhere else in the morning.
Well, yes, I'm bored and trying to find excuses for not studying..
I’d be inclined to make something reeeally small, quiet and fast. Preferably quite a flat body. Give it basic obstacle detection, ambient light sensing, and an electret microphone. Plus a suitably sized mylar speaker and driver.
Set the bot free in the target’s living room - with good power management I reckon you could get the bot to last at least a week on a few AA batteries. During the day, when the house lights are on, or when there’s significant ambient noise, the bot will hide somewhere dark, preferably up against a wall, like behind the leg of a couch or something. When it’s ‘safe’ out, the bot will roam around quietly, and infrequently it’ll make some sort of disturbing inhuman creature noise. Of course, when the lights go on, or it hears someone coming, it’s time to hide somewhere new =)
