It is a three wheeled base with two independent drive wheels and an "idle" wheel at the front. The drive wheels are controlled through two off-the-shelf controllers from Diverse Electronic Services (http://divelec.tripod.com) (after I burned out a couple MOSFETs in H-Bridges of my own design).

Because I knew I would want several ways of controlling the wheel h-bridges (Direct control, R/C, laptop, and OOPic), I used Cat5 (Ethernet) connectors to connect to the boards. Now switching between control methods is as simple as connecting Ethernet cable.

The wheels and motors are connected directly. The spokes of the kiddy car gearmotors fit almost exactly in the spokes of the lawn mower tires I had. Because the gearmotor couldn't handle all the weight of the bot, I put short axles underneath, so the wheels support the body directly.

Most of the metal components are built with standard aluminum stock available at Home Depot and most Hobby shops. The main structure was built from scrap parts of a 19" rack mount network switch.

The onboard processor is currently an OOPic2. I'm constantly changing the sensors and the events (hey, it's an experimental platform! :), so sometimes there's no telling what it's going to do when it runs into something.