[Al Skierkiewicz]

William,
There is a method to this madness when it comes to our robots. The dashboard port already gives you the battery voltage as it is read at the RC terminals. If you coupled that to current monitors for the various high current draw motors in your robot you could correlate what systems are drawing high current and when is the RC in danger of cutting out (<8 volts). You could then either automatically shut certain systems down or alert the drive team that they are dangerously close to shutting down and let them determine what to do. We used this method a number of years ago with StangSense, a custom circuit that monitored current in our drive motors and fed the data to a color PDA. The software guys wrote a graphic of the robot for the PDA showing the four drive motors and they went from green to yellow to red as the current went from low to high. Another flashing indicator then showed that the battery was getting close to the level at which the RC would drop out. Remember this was in the days before the backup battery was used.