Punkrobot Animation

This is a project to create as much of the Punkrobot assets as possible. The goal is to get a living wall of robots working and displaying some kind of energy or structure on the background or in the foreground. And if I can, I'd like it to work in such a way that each of the robots have different parts, such as arms and legs or wheels.

Some bits are mainly based on the existing Punkrobot assets but everything is in it's own repository: https://github.com/Punkrobot-labs/Punkrobot-Animation

Punkrobot robot components and programming
You can find more information about these components on an ongoing development blog: http://punkrobotblog.com/home
Requirements

Looking through the comments and FAQs at http://www.punkrobotblog.com they mention that one of the points of the team was getting "flexible," so I am including that here for the sake of making the best out of what is already there.

The robots themselves can't do much if you walk right at them, so they can only be attacked by a cross-body melee weapon. Even that is limited by the size of the robots armature, so for the most part the weapons are based on paddles (this will change when I'm done writing the code), pneumatic actuators, or electric motors.

Most likely they will be controllable via analogue devices, such as keyboards, gamepad, or Arduino boards. I would have liked an interactive development environment so that we could do anything with them, as a personal goal, but it's hard at this point.

But enough of the basics. This is a project in progress anyway, so there might be more there to get it to play in real-time.

So what do we need?
So let's start by answering just those questions.
What does "kind of" mean?

It is commonly known that a robot can be made out of just about anything (so if there is any kind of "cheating" involved in the project...). In the case of Punkrobot, what we must have is just enough stuff to build some robots. Think about it, a robot is a "big cephalopod with legs.