Is it legal to use a Beaglebone as a co-processor? I have had success running ROS and a Kinect off both a BBB and a Pi, but the Pi is underpowered for onboard vision processing. I don't have any Panda board experience.

The benefit of ROS is the code is all open source, integration into a FRC robot would take some work. The pi has a special camera that works directly into the GPIO? My thoughts the the Rpi would be challenged if it was getting its vision from USB.

BTW ROS is the Willow Garage Robot Operating System. It has a fully integrated OpenCV stack plus lots of methods to integrate navigation sensors/encoders. It would be real KA if it could do autonomous mode - but again I am uncertain if this would be legal.