Die humans die!

Since attending the brilliant Brighton Robot Hack Night, ideas for taking over the world with a miniature robot army have never been far away. From what I learned on Thursday, they wouldn't be particularly threatening (we didn't have time to cover laser guns or making miniature atomic explosive devices) but there would be no danger of them bumping into anything as we made our march on world domination. I seem to be getting confused between Robot Hack Night and the plot of a book I'm reading at the moment. Seeing all the different ideas has got me thinking and the end result was the launch of (yet another) project which will be documented here.

When building robots, there seem to be two main questions: motion and sensors.
Will it be a robot with wheels/tracks or legs? I quite like the look of the hexapods but they're incredibly complicated for a beginner, so I'll stick to the (simpler) wheeled version.
Next you need to decide what time of intelligence and sensing to use - on Thursday we investigated using antennae to detect when the robot had hit an object, then made it back-up a bit, turn a random direction, then set off again. Another common type of robot is the "line follower" where an infrared beam is bounced off a black line and the robot adjusts it's direction to stay above it.

Whatever sensory method is used, the basic premise of my robot will be a wheeled device with two independently driven wheels (turning both at the same velocity causes the robot to travel forwards and backwards whereas forcing the wheels to turn in opposite directions causes the robot to turn). As this could form the basis of a number of similar "critters" it will form the basis of the next robot project.
See the http://www.nerdclub.co.uk/projects/project.asp?id=ROBOTBASE