Christopher Wilson wrote:
> 
[..............]
> He and jointly feel that smalltalk-80/squeak would be much better
> suited for robotics programming then C. We hope to create tools
> that would facilitate a more robust development environment,
> utilizing Squeak's "Everything-is-an-Object" metaphor.
>      So my questions are: Does anyone have experience with Squeak
> and Mindstorms (are you researching this, too?)

Check out what has been done in the Dolphin Smalltalk "BotKit" by Andy
Bower. A critical thing for him was linking Dolphin Smalltalk with the
OCX control used by the regular Lego MindStorms software. You need
Dolphin 2.1 ($30) to run the BotKit - but the BotKit is free.

    http://www.object-arts.com/Bower/Bot-Kit/

>     *Does anyone know anything about the LegoOS, its libraries, or
> compiler?
>     *Does anyone know about the chip used inside the Mindstorm
> robot, in case assembly programming is needed anytime during this
> research project?

Check out Lego Mindstorms Internals -- 
    http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics/

There are also a number of tools listed here to attach to the MindStorms
brick -- so some of these may be very suitable for attachment to Squeak,
but I haven't tried it myself. I would still take a look at what Andy
has done -- his approach is quite nice.

-- Dwight