Success

The robot works. It rolled around under its own power for the first time. There is a huge amount of work yet to be done, but this proves to concept. I used my MacBook because the eee PC still hasn't arrived. It looks like Canada lost out when it came to getting part of the first wave of shipments. I had to take the rear shocks and springs out and replace them with solid links to take the weight. Hopefully the eee PC will arrive soon and halve the payload.

Here's a video of the robot following a path marked by green lines. It works fairly well, but it definitely makes errors, as witnessed at the end of the video. I don't have a wheel encoder working yet, so I have to adjust the throttle manually to keep the robot moving as the battery level drops.

This is a good moment to thank everyone who's helped me get this project going. Particularly everyone in the UBC Thunderbird Robotics Team, without whose help this project would never have even begun, much less gone anywhere.