Hi Jones,
A couple of months back I was sort of at the same level. I started working on a Hexapod with BeagleBoard-xM onboard. I plan to achieve fully mobile and autonomous behavior within a couple of weeks from now. Also, I have started documenting all my learnings into a tutorial series. You can check it out here:
http://www.alphalem.com/learn.html
I have kept in mind to explain all the small details that matter for such a project. Let me know what you think about it (kartiktiwari@alphalem.com).
-Kartik