UofAZ's Matt Bunting Intel Atom Z530 based Hexapod w/PS3 controller: video http://bit.ly/q6erh.

I took a trip to Tucson last weekend and played around with this device, and had a quick tour of the Robotics Lab. The brains for this hexapod is the fit-pc2, a really small fanless Atom based PC. It has a custom Microchip PIC board to drive the servos, that connect to the PC via USB. The PS3 controller connects to the PC via bluetooth. It all runs using Ubuntu

Matt developed all the s/w independently for the reverse kinematics, which someone smarter than me said is non-trivial.

The biggest cost is the servos, the big ones are $199 each, (and a hexapod has ,duh, six legs), plus two more per leg. Not as many in a Vstone system, but not the $5 versions from Hobby World

Next steps, make a battery.. Its still tethered to the wall wart, but the Fit-PC2 runs off 9-15V, according to their forum. And add a camera, there's enough processing power on-board to do recognition and tracking.