Modular Robot

So /praggles/.

I plan on beginning the construction of a robot of sorts when school gets back in. In essence, it will be a small computer one wheels. Perhaps we will add a camera or something later.

I want programming to be added to the robot in modules, without recompiling it's "operating system." Essentially, I will write drivers for its motors and then wrap the drivers in python. There will be directories in the robot's filesystem for placing python scripts, and the operating code (C++) will load all python scripts in each directory (different directories indicate different manners of running the scripts) and invoke the python interpreter.

This would allow for the AI coding/any interfacing to be written in python rather than having to write C or C++ code and constantly recompile.

Recommendations on improvements to the system? Is python a decent choice of scripting language? Thoughts?

>>27
Tell me more about this LuaJIT.

>>20
Wrapping C functions in Python is relatively straightforward as well, and >>24 claims there isn't multithreading in Lua. Not that it really matters too much, the computer I'm using is an old single core.

While I'm thinking about it, does anyone know of a way to do pathfinding using a single camera input? I suppose I could use two cameras for three dimensional input, but a microsoft kinect isn't exactly in the budget...