How practical is running the software onboard? Would you have to port it out of Octave to Java? There seems to be a useful library in the form of [jlmath] that may well let you run the program as-is.
I was going to suggest using the audio jack, but it seems you've already found a (really cool) project that's using it.
Anyway, it's a pretty awesome project. I'm building a robotic vacuum cleaner currently, although I'm building the chassis from scratch and that's proving to be a bit of a stumbling block with my current tools. My software right now is pretty much rudimentary collision detection, so something like this is pretty interesting as a far more sophisticated option.
jlmath: http://www.jmathlib.de/
I was going to suggest using the audio jack, but it seems you've already found a (really cool) project that's using it.
Anyway, it's a pretty awesome project. I'm building a robotic vacuum cleaner currently, although I'm building the chassis from scratch and that's proving to be a bit of a stumbling block with my current tools. My software right now is pretty much rudimentary collision detection, so something like this is pretty interesting as a far more sophisticated option.