Emotion in Motion

Total prize pool of $14,000+

Overview

Welcome to Emotion in Motion! Use the Arduino® UNO™ R4 WiFi powered by the Renesas RA4M1 microprocessor to humanize your hardware.

In this competition, we're challenging you to build projects that involve emotions, voice, and/or motor control – anything that brings out the “human-side” of robots or electronics.

Whether your project mimics emotions, reads emotions, displays emotional intelligence, shows off fine motor skills or dexterity, can play and react, or help with tasks, we want to see how you can humanize your hardware from mechanical movements to emotional intelligence.

Get excited! We're giving away 500 Arduino UNO R4 WiFi boards to help you humanize your hardware!

This is your chance to merge emotion and motion, robotics, and Renesas and the UNO R4 WiFi.

The Hardware: UNO R4 WiFi powered by the Renesas RA4M1

The UNO R4 WiFi's primary MCU is the Renesas RA4M1, a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 running at 48 MHz with floating-point capability. It has 256 KB flash and 32 KB SRAM.

Renesas RA4M1 MCU is the core processing engine. The UNO R4 WiFi is built around Renesas’ 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 RA4M1, which processes sensor inputs and makes the real-time decisions that drive the project’s physical response.

The hardware is well suited to motion and control. PWM-capable I/O, GPIO and interfaces such as I²C and CAN give developers ways to connect servos, motors, actuators, and additional controllers.

Connectivity expands what the device can understand. The UNO R4 WiFi also contains an ESP32-S3 for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so projects can potentially combine local Renesas processing with information or intelligence coming from another device or service.

The UNO R4 WiFi has a built-in 12×8 LED matrix. That means a project could physically move while also communicating state or “expression” visually.

The Categories

Your Emotion in Motion UNO R4 WiFi project could be in any of the following categories:

Emotion in Motion: Build a robot with emotion and motion!
Emotion: Bring emotional intelligence to your robotics project to observe, compute, react, and respond to human emotions. You can use voice activation, LLMs and/or VLMs to process and respond to conversations, and sense changes in emotional states. Display emotional AI, mimic emotions, and read human emotions.
Motion: Show off your robot's dexterity, articulation, and fine motor skills. Challenge your machine to complete tasks with a humanoid touch though play, help with tasks, and show off fine movements.
Student Project: Calling all students! We want to see what you can build while balancing classes and coursework.
Note: We will ask for your school email (.edu) to verify that you are an active student. You do NOT need to change your Hackster email to match your school email.
Best Use of Arduino UNO R4 WiFi: Use the UNO R4 to its fullest potential to power your project!

View section

Prizes

We are giving away tens of thousands of dollars in prizes to the top 7 projects! Our judges will pick the best qualifying 7 projects based on the judging criteria outlined in the rules section.