Tonight I started creating the four-wire harnesses for GND, VCC, TRIG, and ECHO for the $4 ultrasonic sensors. I created fie sets for each of the front-facing sensors. This will be the first test of using the Mega to gather data, then send to the BeagleBone. I verified with the maker’s of RoboClaw, that it uses 3V TTL serial. This means no level converter will be necessary to interface it with the BeagleBone.
Found an interesting open source website for SLAM: OpenSLAM. It will take some time to dig through the project and see if anything is usable.