If you are a newbie to robots, the picAxe may be the ultimate "learn robots" chip. You are less concerned with the software, and because PICs are nicely designed you can even not worry so much about the hardware either.
Once you are a "learned individual" you will be ready for a big project in robotics. If your software is fancy at that point, you probably want to go with the Arduino, since somebody made a processing library, and that means pretty pictures on a PC controlling your robot. And the controlling will come along later.
So:
I created a benchmark test: Blink Ten LED`s in sequence. Easy peasy with picAxe dev board. Not so easy to get ten grounds from an Uno. Not without either buying a pins-in breadboard for your Uno, or soldering iron and breadboard shield, but the soldering messes up the apples vs apples tests.
The Arduino Uno and a proto sketch is a pretty nice way to make robots and do fun things with controllers and moveable "stuff".
And... The picAxe chip, with its built-in BASIC interpreter and host of robotics-appropriate commands like SERVOPOS, and TUNE (plays music or beeps and blurps), as well as the PWMout commands and other general goodies that make LEARNING about robots easy and run.
The real "competition" if you care to call it that, is between the chips themselves. This boils down to PIC chips against Atmel chips. PIC chips generally speaking require a more technical approach and special programming tools. The compilers are not often simply free, so the investment is larger.
Check out the whole project at C What I Can Do
Then get crackin' on learning about and building your own robots!
