Good advice, all of it. The specs on the bridge say it supports both Ad-Hoc and infrastructure, and it's designed to either be used as a bridge or an access point connected to a wired router (love this thing already...).
I know we can use wireless G, but the reason I didn't want to was because we're in a small enclosed classroom, which happens to be built like a Faraday cage, with a wireless B/G access point in it already for the school networks, which will be in use on the same laptops for looking up designs/code/etc, and with 20 laptops in the same room, we're pushing it as it is. Wireless N puts us on an entirely different frequency band with more channels, and is not in use anywhere in the school as of now (I believe the access points only support the 2.4 GHz band, not the 5 GHz). It's more of an interference issue, not a speed issue, although having a bunch of wireless N bridges laying around won't be half-bad, either... Not to mention, these things are cheap, so we might as well.
If anyone cares to see,
here's the link to the bridges we're looking at.
This brings me to my next question. Now that I'm confident we can get the robots connected directly to the laptop, any ideas on how to get useful driver data from the laptops to the robots? Say, if we plugged in some USB joysticks to the laptop with the hopes of driving the robots around? I know this is more a question for after the 2010 field control system comes out, but we'd like to not have to buy a bunch of DS's.