[MCahoon]

I presume you are referring to a "PIC" from Microchip which initially referred to "Programmable Interface Controller".

These can be used as a custom circuit, given that your design complies to all the rules for those such as it must be powered only from the robot battery or the Power Distribution Board (so no CMOS RAM battery such as used in single board PCs for example), must not contain any motors (such as fans or hard disk drives) and all processed signals which affect the motor control have to be processed through the cRIO (cannot directly affect the pwm or CAN control of the motor controls), etc, etc.

Just by way of interest, many of the ultrasonic range detectors etc are made with PICs doing the transducer (speaker/microphone) driving and detection, distance calculation and output signal generation. If your (possible) future plans include going into the embedded processing field, knowing how to apply these (and other microcontrollers) is a "GOOD THING".