With the help of an old robot that was being disassembled and trashed I was lucky enough to get the parts for this robot. Basically it is 4 motors powered by an 12v 18amp lead acid battery (so there really are not any where near 18amps available) that are controlled by an Arduino Uno which in turn receives signals from a TV remote through an Infrared Sensor.

This was a really neat project to build, because it actually went through 2 stages. The first was a massive 2′ by 3′ drive train that was incredibly difficult to control as well as inefficient, so I stripped it apart and made another model. The “tread” on this is made up of #35 chain (the best price I found was from Amazon $1 per ft) and the motors are each connected to a gear box.

After a good bit of tinkering with connections that got jiggled loose by the vibrations I started driving it up and down the street and got it up to around 5mph (faster than walking but nothing that jogging could not keep up with). The only problem – the fix is in a project around the corner – is that you have to have a direct line of sight for the IR receiver. I have heard of people taking essentially an acrylic dowel and putting the IR sensor on the bottom so it picks up the remote from 360 degrees, but nothing that seemed to reliable. What I am hoping to do is use some of these and these. Can you contain you excitement to find out what they are? I was more than thrilled to find out about these instead of Xbee.