Reading barcodes using a laser scanner

I am talking about a project to add some more inteligence to the Roomba
robotic vacuum.(the group isteh "hacking" part of
http://www.roombareview.com/chat/  ).

We want to a laser, and light sensor inside the Roomba and used it as a
sensor to detect reflector targets that have barcodes on them. See
these links for two sensor setups, but that don't try to detect bar
codes'  http://www.philohome.com/sensors/lasersensor.htm  and
http://www.rssc.org/newsletter/sep99.pdf

The goal is to have the robot determine its absolute position by
spinning in place, and timing the detection of the reflective targets.
The barcode is to allow the robot to know which of the targets it has
detected.  I was thinking of a system that started with a single stripe
of reflective tape, which was followed by a series of either more
reflective tape, or a missing stripe of tape to indicate binary 0's and
1's.

I see the scribbler robot has the ability to detect barcodes using its
line-following sensors;
http://www.scribblerrobot.com/dl/Resources/BarCodes-v1.0.pdf  .  I see
that it uses a different system of encoding the digit.  It does it by
wide-strip vs. a thin-strip.  It also has some other digits to
determine which way the robot is scanning the code, but we won't need
that, since we know the direction the robot will spin (clockwise)

I have a few questions;

Is there an advantage to the wide-strip / thin-strip system in our
appication?

Any other projects out there that use this sort of laser-sensor in a
barcode system?

Any more advice regarding our project? (you can put it on that web site
if you wish)

Joe Dunfee