And my question is regarding first time use: Can I plugin my monitor, keyboard and mouse. Boot up, enable wireless and simply connect remotely afterwards via VNC as I did with the other Pi’s I bought? Or do I have to do something special since I’m using the Raspbian for Robots software?
You can boot with with monitor and keyboard if you want. However raspbian for robots is preconfigured to have VNC and SSH already enabled. So if you have an ethernet cable, you can connect the Pi to your laptop, or router, figure out the IP address, and VNC directly with that IP address.
Once in, you set your wifi as usual.
Or you can drop a wpa_supplicant.conf file with your wifi info into the boot folder of the SD card (while in your laptop) and boot up the pi. It will set up the wifi for you.