Well, in an effort to push my as-yet unstarted robotics project forward, I decided to begin as I always do: by spending money! I ordered two windshield wiper motors from American Science and Surplus which I hope will do for powering my little robotic minion around. I’ll have to do an evaluation of their power before I set too many more design parameters, but they should be good enough to push a fairly good sized little bot around.

Now, I need to line up some 12v batteries and a charger, dust off my ammeter, and think about a test rig.

Addendum: I found this page which details a lot of the tests you can do on motors to help establish your robots overall performance characteristics. Good stuff.