Arduino car on bluetooth remote appears to crash when motors started I built a Arduino robot car which accepts instructions via bluetooth. The instructions are pretty simple, they tell the car to stop, go forward, reverse, turn left or turn right. 

When I have the car powered through the computer USB (ie when I have just uploaded the sketch), all works fine. However, when I run off independent battery power, the arduino seems to restart whenever I give the car an instruction which means the motors have to operate.

I know the sketch is restarting inside the Arduino because the blue tooth terminal displays the startup text which is inside the 'setup' function.

What is going wrong here? What issue am I encountering?

The board is an Arduino UNO with an Arduino Motor Shield attached. The blue tooth and two sonic sensors are attached to the motor shield pins.

Also, I have a 9V battery attached to the motor shield. Plus 4 times 1.5V batteries powering the UNO. Am I screwing up the power at all? Getting too much? Or too little?
it sounds like the motors are pulling down the battery voltage enough to reboot the Arduino; and the USB-port is able to supply enough current without as much voltage drop.

We'd need to see a schematic, but check that the power supplied to your Arduino and power supplied to the motors are completely independent; that the Arduino only supplies current to a switch or a relay in the motors' power circuit but not to the motors themselves.