I'm going to go in reverse order... since vision processing has been minimal for you in years past... the Jetson is the equivalent of jumping into the deep end to learn how to swim. That's not bad... it's just a warning.
Next up... try some searching on CD before asking questions. There is a thread over here devoted to the TK1 boards:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=129827
Now to your specific questions.
1) It is an embedded computer. You can use it how you like but the "sweet spot" for this board is with the Nvidia GPU that can, in theory, be used for better vision processing. It takes special coding to make that work though.
2) You can interface it with the driver station or the robot. It's probably safer to keep it on the driver station side but you could place it on the robot side. I recommend wiring it to the VRM via the 12v/2A port BUT you don't have to do that. In fact, this board can in theory pull more than 2A. It is considered a custom circuit so you could wire it up to a 40A breaker per R37.
3) To take full advantage of this board you will want to do C++ programming with OpenCV. You will probably need to run custom scripts.
If anyone has other questions then please feel free to ask. We've been playing with these boards for about 9 months now. We now own 4 or 5 of them between the team and a few mentors.
Also, it's worth mentioning that not all CUDA cores are created equal. The CUDA implementation for Nvidia's high end graphics cards is not equivalent to the CUDA implementation for these boards, despite what Nvidia's marketing department would like you to believe.