Gary, thank you for the welcome!

I'm well aware that we will have issues - there's an idea to make a 1:4 scale version to make sure we can actually do it first, but we've set aside around £2500 for the bot, not including spares. Ideally, we don't really want to spend more than that on a MK1 robot.

It would seem I'm working with some mildy outdated information regarding drum spinners. 9000rpm+ would be an excellent goal, but motor wise, I'd assume some gearing would be involved - is there a particular one you'd recommend? Do most people run 48V or 24V?