I now have all the appropriate hardware to begin fleshing out the majority of the software to get the robots to interact. Providing the process of transferring data across a true serial port (rather than those fake ports that fooled me before) adapting the hardware should no longer be a problem. The programming itself is more or less straight C, and will benefit greatly from formal state and activity specifications. First up: getting the robots to find each other. Beyond that... well...we'll see.

So in theory, this whole bout with IR sending data may not even be necessary, but it's nice to have a reference to work from via the IR protocol. The WiFi protocol will probably be very similar, though trimmed down a bit, as the hardware handles most of the repeating / acknoledgement.

The plan still remains to use IR as a beacon system in establishing where the robots are. The most likely avenue is to ise the Virtual Walls that came with robots, as they are essentially a constant IR transmitter that, after some adjustment, could act as an effective location marker.