Arduino

Sorry, had it in my head for some reason. Blame the Christmas eggnog

On the flip side there is a wealth of information around on Arduino.
It really comes down to what the requirements are.
A learning exercise is one thing. If thats the case then a raspberry pi is also a good platform though not so strong in the robot control area yet

I've spent alot of time reading the posts on the Arduino forum (blame the Christmas telly)

I do recommend http://rcarduino.blogspot.co.uk/

There are also tutorials on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCxzA9_kg6s

The platform has limitations. There are typically only a couple of hardware interrupt pins and the code examples I've seen are single threaded. Some interesting posts

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,105573.0.html

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,50539.0.html

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,60508.0.html


Most of the fighting robot applications I have thought of are achievable with some simple analogue electronics and at worst a PIC. Horses for course really. If someone is beating your bot or trying to catapult it through the air keeping it simple is important

thanks to the Antweight guys also found this link
http://www.robowars.org/wikka/PololuB328

Or you could try Picaxe. http://www.picaxe.com/
They supply lots of kits [go to the right top of the page and click shop] and a free programming editor. They run BASIC [which is quite powerful these days] and their bottom end chip supports 4 outputs and 2 inputs, takes about 400 lines of code and costs £1.80. I have several autonomous robots which use their stuff.

Picaxe was used on this

http://robowars.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=494