Interfacing an Esplora to an Xbee

Alright, so ive been working on a school capstone project. i chose to design and build a quadcopter that would be able to hopefully lift a small camcorder. I decided to use an Esplora as the controller and constructed a decent powersource to make it portable. as for the quadcopter itself, i chose to use a general Arduino Uno rev3. i am using a wireless sd shield along with an ADAFRUIT motorshield v2. the RF communication is to be handled by two XBEE 900 pro rf modules wire antenna. my problem is that i have completed the programming for both microcontrolling, while it verifies correctly and uploads no problem, however, communication will not progress beyond that point. the esplora functions on a serial monitor basis. i dont beleive the code is completely wrong, nor do i doubt the issue is hardware related. the esplora will not connect or communicate with the xbee, the uno part works fine if i use the terminal on the xctu software with the xbee.