>Once you lose the chassis, the size could be made reasonable.
>I've always thought this would be fun to make a beer cooler
>that followed me around.  I could be the envy of
>everyone at the beach.

I once had a lecturer at Polytech who was threatening to make a robot that
followed him around shouting "hey wait for me".

I think what he suggested doing was to have a belt with a heap of IR LED's
around it (probably a dozen or so would be sufficient) pulsed at a rate the
robot could recognise and follow. I do not know how he intended to have the
robot keep from crashing into him and knocking him over.

The only trouble with this scheme for your fridge is the sunlight at the beach
would probably saturate the IR receiver unless you could work out some form of
attenuator using photographic filters or some such that the robot could switch
in automatically if it found the receiving photodiodes saturated.

Even more impressive would be to lie on the beach and the robot to have enough
speech recognition capability that when you turned to it and said "another beer
please" it opened the fridge door with one arm and reached in and handed you a
beer with the other arm:) 'Course it would only understand your voice :))

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.