awesome use of the swivel up front to give that differential steering.

I really have to pull my ROV out of mothballs one of these days.
Between my netbook and my smartphone’s internet connection my dream of super-long range is actually doable!
(I was using a commercial 2.4ghz video transmitter that limited my range)

also, remember the three laws of robotics when building stuff that has the capability of hurting folks, first law especially.

thanks for getting my brain going, hack a day!

it was brute-force engineering, as I simply reinforced everything to handle the torque of the motor hitting the limits of the steering.

it all worked splendidly, however it absolutely sucked going over rough terrain because of the plastic wheels.

(i was trying to design something to go off-road and unfortunately it was terrible at it, even when I tried studding the plastic tires.)

If you are staying on fairly even terrain or pavement then these are really cool platforms, but i ended up designing and building my own base using differential (tank-like) steering for my off-road ROV platform.

another advantage to these things is they have their own battery for moving, so you can keep that stuff isolated and get less noise into sensitive systems like micro controllers, sensors and/or video equipment like cameras or transmitters.