Palladium hydride electrical generation?

It can - you can burn the hydrogen in a fuel cell or a heat engine. There are issues:

1) Palladium is very expensive, but it can be used to store hydrogen at lowish pressure.

2) The hydrogen has to come from somewhere, either from electrolysis which requires energy from one of the usual sources (nuke, fossil , solar etc) or chemically from fossil fuel.

The energy density by weight and cost is quite low - which is another way of saying that there are better ways to do the same thing. There is a reason that almost all commercially available electric cars (hybrid or full) use lithium batteries - that reason is that it is currently the most cost effective solution.

You would almost certainly do better to make methanol with the original input energy (and CO2 and water) and then burn that in an internal combustion engine.

Google this stuff - there is lots of information around.

MK

Ah well back to the drawing board for my theory of using THAT as a source of power for a high-power robot.

What sort of robot, how much power ?

MK

Its for my high school science fair.  I am building it to carry heavy loads to an ordered point that you can tell it where you want it to go with vocal commands. It will then reference the preloaded map for matching locations to take the load in question.

The problem is I am calculating a load of about 1000 watts so it would MURDER a car battery and most other batteries in minutes. Obviously a robot that's out of power is NOT particularly impressive and taking 200 car batteries is out of the question.

Can you describe the calculations - moving large loads doesn't have to use lots of power if you do it slowly.

MK

Computing costs of 700 watts, motor costs of 300 to 400 watts moving @ human walking speeds.

If you want help you will need to provide a bit more detail  - that's an awful lot of power for the computer - why can't it be static and talk to the robot by radio ?

Re. the power to move - a wheeled vehicle on a flat surface requires almost no power to keep moving at walking speed.  It needs power to accelerate.

If you describe, ideally with diagrams, what you are attempting then people can help you much more.

MK

I am trying for a robot that can respond intelligently to voice commands as well as being able to think itself out of sticky spots. Talking over radio does not provide the response times need for that.

As for the "power to move" we are talking about moving 200 pounds down a hallway. For the science fair it will be moving my father (all 240 pounds of him) from my homeroom about 600 feet down the hall into whichever classroom the judges tell the robot to move him into.

Basically what you are talking about is no different (for scoping the power required) from  man on an electric scooter (electric wheelchair) with a laptop PC on his knee.

We know that electric scooters have multi mile range from a 12V battery (you can google them to get more information).

My i7 powered laptop has a 90W power supply but uses much less most of the time.

So you can obviously power this thing from a single 12V lead acid battery and expect a few miles and a few hours endurance.

Of course "respond intelligently to voice commands as well as being able to think itself out of sticky spots" is currently science fiction  - you'll need to define that properly to reach an achievable specification.

MK