[bhaidet]

if you can find a highly curved mirror, you wouldn't need any motor at all. We have talked hypothetically, but never actually enacted, this idea.

Point the camera straight up to the ceiling, but have a convex mirror pointed down at it that lets it see a distorted image, but an image all the way around. If you use some clever algorithms, you can correct for the mirror's distortion and produce a 360-degree image to feed into your stock color/shape recognition software.