I spotted this via the Adafruit blog - David Singleton has blogged about his hands-on with a Raspberry Pi alpha board:
http://blog.davidsingleton.org/hands-on-with-raspberry-pi/
Unfortunately, openjdk does not do JIT (just in time compilation) on ARM, so the performance of this set up was not going to get fast enough to drive the car (it managed about 1 frame per second without the neural network running). This was just the inspiration I needed to re-implement the project in C++! So, after a few further evenings’ work I was able to claim what I think is the world’s first self driving (RC) car powered by Raspberry Pi! The new C++ code can be found at github.com/dps/nnrccar/tree/master/cpp-driver
He also writes at the end about how he installed Arduino via apt and was able to establish a serial connection to a UNO via USB.
Cheers,
Drew