You don't add whiskers to a robot to make it look like your pet cat. You add whiskers to give it a sense of touch. A robot without a sense of touch would go slamming into things right and left and do itself and your house no good at all.

Whiskers are mechanical switches that simply provide the robot with an on/off status. On can mean the whisker is in contact with an object such as a table leg. Off can mean the whisker is in the clear, for example, and the robot can react accordingly (well, actually, it can react any way you program it to react). Whiskers are easy to read with a program and are an invaluable aid for navigation.

So what does a whisker look like? The whisker itself consists of a very thin metal wire. The whisker wire is mounted to the robot's base plate, which is attached to the ground terminal of the battery through the body cable. The whisker is positioned through a hole in a small metal bracket, which is connected to a wire that goes to the robot's controller board.

Normally, the whisker wire doesn't touch the metal bracket. But when something comes in contact with the whisker and moves it enough, the wire does make contact with the bracket. You can write the robot's program to move away from an object when the wire makes contact.