It's been a while. As a quick update, I ordered and received those additional parts, started a new job, and have moved across the country. Somebody at my work had done a presentation on RC stuff and I learned about some new stuff that was out there. It has been a few years since I originally looked up my information on Radio Control technology, so I did some more research and discovered something very important and a bit frustrating (in a good way). I found this article on Sparkfun that describes how to hook my RC receiver directly to my arduino and have access to all of the channels without taking up any more processing power than I was already using. So I unpacked my robot last night, took it apart and as a test tried hooking up my receiver to my arduino and seeing if it read the values. The test was successful.

What does this mean? It basically means I can take the PIC board out of the equation. It does mean I will need to use about 8 more pins on the arduino, but since I upgraded my arduino to an ATmega, this isn't really an issue. I will need to update my code, but it should make the code much simpler. At this point, I need to work on the shield redesign that will take these design changes into account. Before I do that, I will assemble the shield kit I bought (I may end up using this as my final board anyways) and start hooking up stuff to here. I need to work on finding my design notes regarding which pins I was planning on hooking the additional sensors to. If I can't find my notes, I may need to do some more research again.