PalmBot is based on the PPRK orginally developed by Greg Reshko at CMU. I liked his idea of controlling a robot with a Palm, mostly because it meant I could buy a fairly inexpensive motor controller (in this case the Pontech SV203), instead of a whole microcontroller with processor and memory. The Palm gives you a nice LCD, lots of processing power, and plenty of memory. However, I didn't want to pay $300 for the whole kit. Instead I designed my own robot that cost under $100 to build.
Each servo drives a gear which turns a belt that turns the gears attached to the wheels. It's a tank-style drive system. So far, it only has a bump sensor in the front (consisting of two microswitches with a polycarbonate bumper glued to them).
I'm planning to add FischerTechnik pnuematics shortly, as well as IR distance sensors.
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