We're students in The Netherlands and now doing this waiter robot project. This waiter robot will actually bring beers from the bar to the customer. The robot moves autonomously. So once the robot runs, the robot runs by itself.
Long story short, we need the robot to recognize the customer table and go after the beers are being taken, then the robot must be able to go back to the bar and take another order.
We've bought Arduino UNO as our microcontroller together with the Ardumoto Motor Driver as the H-bridge. But now we're wondering about whether Arduino UNO will be capable of handling like 3-4 sensors namely, ultrasonic sensors to avoid the obstacles, the weight sensor to detect whether the beers have been taken or not, (maybe) a color sensor to detect the customer and the bar.
Is Arduino capable of handling such tasks? We really do need advices since we're new to this kind of stuffs.
btw some people also recommend Parallax Propeller as an option for our microcontroller. But the programming language they use in Parallax is so difficult.
Given your needs, I wouldn't recommend the standard UNO, but rather the Mega, mainly for the extra code and ram space. The standard 328-based Uno would probably handle all the sensors and the motors OK (although for what you want, that motor controller may be undersized - how big is this robot supposed to be, and how much weight it is going to carry?) - but it likely wouldn't have the room for the code and other data needed to navigate in the manner you want. Maybe I am wrong though; maybe you could look at it as a challenge...?