> I will post here if the service is still available (there is currently some talk
> about it being dropped by MIT). If things do go bad write to me privately I am
> always happy to talk to people.

I *think* that was a joke.

> With regards to comms, I was thinking low priority background comms driven by a
> virtual clock. I have done some work on this and it looks VERY promising.

Have you considered RS485? This is relatively immune to electrical noise.

> Splitting up the robot into several subsystems and using one or more PICs to
> control each of these I beleive it should be possible to greatly reduce the
> power of the CPU needed to do the actual thinking.

I do this even when I use a very powerful CPU. It's nice to be able to
have smart sensors and actuators that can all be put on the same bus.
-- 
D. Jay Newman           ! Polititions and civilations come and
jay@sprucegrove.com     ! go but the engineers and machinists 
http://enerd.ws/robots/ ! make progress
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