Discovered this wonderful open source hardware platform from a colleague, now I know what we can do to modify the birthday present Takeru got (a Tamiya forklift).
First we got the Arduino Uno board and some LED, here is Takeru designing a traffic lights (cross street) with a speaker for blind pedestrian.
Finally, we bought some plexiglass and spaces, nuts/bolt and made a platform for adding future sensors etc to the forklift. First project will be to use a IR remote control to drive it (instead of the dangling wire). Then with sensors we will try to make it autonomous (somewhat).