Your probably right about the lego sensors and all, I don't think they use mindstorms. But alot of good suggestions, Inline::C is probably the way to go if I really want to develop in perl. If all the processing is done off board that really answers the gist of my question. I think when I take this class I'm gonna first do it in C, and then in perl to compare the speed difference. It should be interesting to program hardware in perl!
Thanks dbp for all of your input!

Where there's a Willman, there's a way!