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You could look through the codes of some of these robots. I personally referred quite a bit to the turtlebot's because the tutorial is quite complete.

My own experience in working on differential drive robot: here. I did not start with the robot model though. That came quite late into the development because I was eager to see things moving.

I would think the topic cmd_vel (geometry_msgs/Twist) is a good starting point, since both the teleop and navigation uses it to control the robot.

Another good reference I found by mwise of willow garage: here