Climbing Robot (Need Opinions, Advice, and Critics)

Hello,
I am going to try and make this as brief and to the point as possible.

I have been working on a project for a month now, learning what I can with ROS, Python, Jetson Inference, etc and doing what I can in terms of mechanical feasibility. This project consists of developing a autonomous robot, that can climb up a steel beam using magnetic wheels I have designed and tested. My problem is that I am still novice to ROS so I need advice on what direction or avenues I should consider.

So far, my results have been:

  1. Built a physical representation of a robot, using a differential drive kinematic
  2. Running Ubuntu 18.04, with ROS and have had success with training my own object detection models, running small serial communication nodes, and running pretrained models from Jetson Inference

Currently, the questions I have for the other tasks I want this to accomplish are as follows:

  1. How to accomplish beam alignment of the robot? I can detect the beam but are there ways of teaching a robot its orientation to a 2D image, maybe detect the beam and give it a coordinate system?
  2. Is Lidar for proper navigation/home finding?

I really appreciate the advice and help from anyone here, I have been so excited to get more into robotics and this community has been helpful with its guides and tutorials.

Kind regards, baehr4308