I was only wring for a half a summer, but I believe there is a DC->DC step up as part of the standard wiring board. It should be the 2.5"ish square block covered with heatsink fins. I think it pulses the straight battery voltage through an inductor and regulates 24v out. I do not now how much current you could pull from this thing and I do not remember what its actually used for, but you should be able to solder up a step-down circuit to take this 24v to laptop voltage (17-18ish?) in about 10 minutes with an LM317 and outboard pass transistor (maybe the MJ2995 if you want overkill safety without heavily heatsinking).
On the topic of image recognition, is there any pre-existing software (especially Linux software?) to determine the shape of "color" (IR distance) blobs in an image? It seems like if you could see a blob and determine how far away it was on average (and therefore its actual height), you should be able to easily detect other robots/structures on the field.
As to whether having your robot autonomously see other robots/tall game objects will be useful this year... that's still up for grabs until Saturday.
