Family has been out of the house for the weekend, spent thirteen hours yesterday, plus another four today, working on the mower program.

I made absolutely phenomenal progress, getting the simulation working in both manual and AI-driven modes, implemented the motor controller libraries, wrote a preliminary version of the actual, real-world AI, and even stubbed out the image processing.

If anyone wants to clone the code and play around with it, it's all here. On a Raspbian installation, simply run "python jobe.py simulation" to see the simulator in AI-driven mode, or "python jobe.py manual_simulation" to drive the mower yourself via the arrow keys!