A Vision Program that teaches itself the game

[yash101]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm

^^ That seems like something I want in my next year program. I would like it if I could have a tablet pc for the driver station, with the robot constantly generating a map of the field. If you click on a location on the field in the tablet, the robot could automatically navigate there with a high accuracy.

However, for that to be possible, the program would need to know where all the obstacles are. How do you suggest getting the exact position of other robots and field elements? Should I have a Kinect (or a couple), outputting the distance to all the field elements?

This gives me another question. What does the Kinect distance map look like? How do you get the distance measurement from a single pixel?