ROS tutorial on supporting and programming a useful custom robot
Is there a tutorial explaining, from start to finish, how to support a new robot in ROS, and configure it to actually do something? I have a very simple custom robot with an amd64-based architecture, two-wheeled drive, webcam, and bumper skirt. I'm trying to keep my goals modest, so to start, I'd like to use ROS and OpenCV to detect a face with the webcam, and control the motors to follow the face while avoiding simple obstacles. I've already completed a prototype for the face-detection part.
I've read over the official tutorials, but they only cover extremely low-level tasks like installing system packages. The software package list page seems to include some very sophisticated software, but most seem to have zero documentation, and I can't find any tutorials explaining how to use them.
I also saw this question, but it only covers defining the physical shape of a robot in URDF and nothing about the installation of the software on the physical robot or configuring it to do actual tasks.
I've installed ROS, and I understand the basic package system, but it's unclear to me what to do next.
This is a tall request, since every robot is built different. But maybe someone could do a simpler but more complete tutorial for a differential drive robot. ROS is not user friendly by and large and there is a steep learning curve, plus it is rapidly changing ... Fuerte will bring new changes.