Hello Thomas,
i have been associated with a robotics project that is housed at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA for the past year or so. This is a project that possibly could interest you. The project is called Ubiquity Robots; you can look at
ubiquityrobotics.com, but there is not much there, only a picture. Look instead at
https://sites.google.com/site/ubiquityrobots/
I have recently been thinking about the software interface for programming this robot (called Hercules), but I have not reached any firm conclusions yet. The robot uses ROS, but I think ROS is pretty hard to use and we need something simpler. But I may be missing something.
Are you by any chance in the Bay Area? If so, please join us at the Dojo. We meet there on Saturdays, at 1:30 pm.