[DoritoChef]

FWIW, after realizing I never directly answered your question, I figured I should give you a full response.

Rospy aside, writing and implementing your own SLAM/path-planning tools in ROS is quite simple once you get familiar with the architecture of ROS. All the sensor data can be collected by subscribing to the right channel, and then you can return driving instructions back to a controller by publishing them on another channel. Since all this channel business operates on the network layer, you can even offload the computational workload of the algorithms to a remote system and have the robot get its moving instructions over Wi-Fi.