The first steps would obviously be to google/search the wiki if someone has done this already. At least some parts are probably already done, for example laser or camera drivers. It looks like you already did that, so you'll need to port the robot on your own. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a generic "porting robots to ROS" guide. Here are (some) of the steps that you'll need to do for that, assuming that you not only want to use ROS for communication, but also want to utilize other packages like, e.g. navigation.
- Setup a URDF description for your robot. You should have understood tf and read the following REPS:
- Port your drivers to ROS, here it is very advisable to look for common ROS messages, that obvisouly depend on the hardware. Some examples:
- geometry_msgs/Twist for controlling base movements
- sensor_msgs/JointState for publishing joint states (angles) of articulated robots
- sensor_msgs/LaserScan for lasers
- Setup launch files that bring up your robot
This should leave you with a robot that runs, can be teleoperated, and where you can visualize everything in rviz.
More things to look into are diagnostics, navigation, arm navigation.
However you do it, if such a guide does not exist, it would be very useful to document your process in some sort of wiki so a guide can be created.
I got an email from a researcher and got this good implementation for Darwin (I've not yet tried though): http://wiki.iri.upc.edu/index.php/Darwin_installation