RC Jeep Robot

Well, here's the post about my first robot.

It's not yet finished... so bear with me as I iron out all the bugs.

I purchased an RC Jeep at Walgreen's (US drugstore) partly because I love Jeeps, and also because I thought it would be cool to turn into a bot.

I took it apart and couldn't really figure out the board in the car, so after a light bulb went off in my head weeks later, I decided to bypass the switches in the remote and trigger them using transistors.

The thing with all the wires jumping out of it is the remote, gutted. It's currently being powered by my Arduino. 

Things I still need to figure out...

• How to interface my Sharp IR sensor - right now I'm just all confused with it. Math is NOT my strong point, so I'm struggling through with all the numbers I have to deal with here. My sensor reads a low number when very very close to something, goes up, then again goes down after about 30cm (not sure if that's an accurate number, just guessing) I can get an LED to light up when a certain value is reached... and I've tried to transpose that code to turning a transistor on and off... but I need to find an elegant way to do this - I don't like cluttering my code up.
• How to mount everything on top of the Jeep so the IR sensor can see where it's going. 
• How to add more power to the Jeep itself - it's got a decent speed, but if it touches anything, it'll stop. Maybe more torque is actually what's needed. It only cost $10 though... so this isn't too important.