It is fun to imagine driving a bot in those dark forbidden areas such as covered pipes, crawl spaces, attics and anywhere the imagination takes you.  Add a camera and explore, inspect and discover.  My project for The Hackaday Prize 2017, The Inspectorbot, was great fun to build, plus I learned a lot about controlling a robot through WIFI with a webpage and live streaming multiple cameras in near real time.  I also learned that those crawl spaces are bumpy.  In this year’s project, I plan to build a four wheel drive robot with four legs that will fold out for walking in rough terrain.  Hopefully the new bot will be able to take a bot in the crawl space and beyond.  Wheels are easy to control and fast but are not so good on rough terrain.  Legs are great for rough terrain, but require a lot of motors and a feedback system to know what position the leg is in, if the leg is touching the ground, and with how much force.  Along with a lot of motors is the need for a lot of motor drivers.  If the bot has six legs, it can use static balance with three legs on the ground at all times.  I want to use a four legged design so I need to develop a dynamic balance system which will require an accelerometer/gyro chip.  The main controller will be a Raspberry Pi with a camera that will blue tooth to a special motor drive board I plan to build as another project.  Control will be through a WIFI connection with a webpage.  And just for fun, I plan to make the Raspberry PI camera module detachable to allow the “head” to be placed on different bot bodies.  I love sci-fi inspiration!  The project will also be fully open source.