Vision... what? how?

[mrklempae]

... OpenCV is a great route if you're going to use a camera like the Kinect or Asus Xtion Pro (which allow you to measure depth). The problem with that is that it's not easy to set up. You have to rebuild the libraries from the source to get things like OpenNI support, CUDA (gpu core) support, multi core or hyperthreaded core support, and other cool stuff. I have personally been trying for the last week to successfully build it using CMake with little or no success (I'm going to try to find someone to FTP me a working build). There's quite a few options available if you're going to go with a small form-factor desktop computer on your robot.