The new robot is now being constructed. I scavenged an ASC-16 servo controller from an earlier project and am using this to control the pan and tilt of the stereo cameras. Although it's quite old the ASC-16 (sold by www.medonis.com) allows good control of speed and acceleration and has quite a few features. I also have five ultrasonic sensors networked and connected to an I2C-USB converter. These have been tested out and are working well.

The robot currently looks like this http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2110/2169598662_0fce766497.jpg

Ultrasonics being tested http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2182/2141668593_14624ef85e.jpg

The main purpose of this robot will be to test and develop the Sentience system (http://code.google.com/p/sentience/), and I'll also be using a bridgeware framework (http://code.google.com/p/robotbridgeware/) so that the various pieces of hardware are all treated as network devices by the higher level software. This idea was inspired from a talk last year by Matt Trossen, and also in another recent talk Rod Brooks mentioned that all the devices on the Pacbots are treated as network devices.