Make it a project of the both of you, should work if you are friends
He brings in the hardware and you do your part.
The Arduino can't handle video without special shields, but it can control the pan and tilt. So if the cam can be connected to e.g. a laptop and an arduino does the aiming, optionally controlled from the laptop KB or mouse, you have a very nice project.
The CMUcam is made for interfacing with microcontrollers - it has its own on-board (and much more powerful) microcontroller with memory that handles the processing of the video frames and simply outputs data strings (depending on the setup for the functionality needed) via serial - for the most part. While it is possible (IIRC) to get the raw feed from the camera, it generally isn't needed, as the processing you would likely do on it can be handled by the CMUcam itself (it has built in color recognition, blob tracking, etc - all built in).
Arduino? - as you can tell from the above, you shouldn't have much of a problem interfacing the Arduino with the CMUcam and the pan/tilt platform (well, assuming the pan/tilt uses servos or some kind of serial link - if it uses something else, it may be more complex, but still possible I would think with the Arduino). Just go to the CMUcam site and get the manual (and example code; albeit perhaps not for the Arduino - you might find some AVR code, though):
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/
