A little background on my project :
I am wanting to build a remote viewing system / house robot for my home that will let me see what's going on via a web interface and/or Windows application which I will write. I want to be able to move the robot around the house and interact with things. I live in two different states and I think it would be useful to be able to check things out remotely. I do have a camera security system in place now, but those cameras are fixed / servoless, and I think this will be a fun project ( I really just want to learn robotics ). Now I could probably get away with mounting a camera on a rolling platform, but I do kinda want to build a hexapod with an articulated head, with two cameras to feed me stereoscopic imagery which I can view on a 3D monitor. I'm a software developer so I'm not too worried about the programming side. AMBITIOUS but it would be fun!
So far I've ordered an Arduino Uno R3 Starter Kit and a WiFi shield, which I plan to use for controlling the robot's servos ( and per zoomkat's recommendation, probably a SSC-32 from Lynxmotion to handle the servos ).
Anyway... to the point of this post :
I understand ( having read other threads ) that the Arduino Uno is not practical for streaming video, and neither does it appear that the WiFi or Ethernet shields designed for the Uno are meant to function like a wireless router on behalf of other devices, like a webcam. SO I'm thinking, beyond moving the robot around and toggling a flashlight, the Arduino could be used to power on / off / reset an off-the-shelf IP webcam, which is configured to automatically connect to my local WiFi and stream video. Sound like this could work?
I'm looking at a HooToo camera
http://www.hootoo.com/product/network-cameras.html
but man they are expensive.
I'd like to find an affordable IP webcam, ideally one with an open source C/C++ web cam viewer. Anyone have a suggestion? Thanks!
There are plenty of cheap and good quality wireless web cams with remote steering control. A few of those dotted around the house would get you to 90% of your requirement for zero effort. The ones I've used support dynamic dns, motion detection/alerting via several methods and seem ideal for what you're asking for. I know you said you're doing this for fun, but you might want to get the simple cheap solution working anyway so you have something to watch while you develop your own rover based solution. They are available with low light sensitivity and IR illumination which makes them especially useful for monitoring a house which is not occupied.
The standard cameras provide an HTTP interface so can be controlled and viewed via a web browser - no special client software needed. One of the ones I use did also come with a client that managed a bunch of cameras and presented them in a grid on the screen with zooming and recording and so on, but that's just bells and whistles and a web browser is all you need.
If you want stereo vision then you can't simply take a pair of steerable cameras - you would need them to be mounted on a common steerable head. One option would be to canibalise the steering mechanism from a standard cam and figure out how to attach a pair of cameras in place of the single standard one. That should just be a matter of cutting and gluing. That gives you web based steering as well as the usual controls for brightness etc. You will almost certainly find that the camera itself hosts a web site that presents the live camera feed in the same page as the widgets needed to configure and control it so the whole thing will be very user friendly.
You do also have the option of making your own steerable camera mount from scratch and using RC servos to operate it - more satisfying but a huge amount of extra work. The Arduino will control these without any problem, but now you need your Arduino to take the place of the standard controller and provide a web service or UI to control it, and if you want to integrate that with the live video feed then you will need to make your own mashup to do it.
For the rover, all you would need is a wifi interface. If you're going to put the cameras on the same rover then you might consider mounting a wifi router on the rover and using ethernet connections to the Arduino and cameras - this simplifies things considerably and should make your rover much more reliable - if it can cope with lugging a router box around as well as everything else.
Note that if this rover is going to be wireless then it will need to be battery powered - the power consumption of a rover and pair of wireless cameras will be considerable so you will either need to have some way to recharge it, or compromise between a huge battery or a very short battery life.
While you're looking into stereo display headsets, you might consider using a pair of cameras much further apart than your eyes to give you an artificial sense of scale. I've never done it myself but I've read of some very cool looking projects using this approach to look at landscapes and cloudscapes.
http://www.dannyvanmaanen.nl/?p=965 (in dutch but google translate might help)
check Dericam M801W PTZ ==> - Dericam M801W PTZ 3xOptical Zoom IP Camera Demo Video - YouTube -
has a connector (alarm trigger) to connect to an Arduino (never did BTW)
Hey guys thanks for the replies!
On the point about stereoscopic vision, the solution isn't actually too bad : I have a newer Samsung 3D LED TV, and it supports not only the type 3D you'd get natively from a bluray, but plays 3D mp4s and mpgs that are formatted in side-by-side mode. So to view my camera feed stereographically, I'd only need to access the current image of both cameras and then present them to the display in this manner :
Then press the [3D] button on my remote and tell it the input is side-by-side. At that point the TV hardware does its magic and I can put my glasses on. At worst I'd have to write a Windows app that pulls the images down continuously, scales them 50% on the X, and displays them. I anticipate timing issues between cameras and a bit of a headache with motion haha but for a relatively static scene I think it will look pretty cool. Now on the other hand maybe someone makes a prebuilt 3D stereographic camera that supplies side-by-side natively? I'll be looking into that.
As far as the carrying a wireless router around, yes that would work. I'll commit to ordering something tonight and see how it goes. Worst case scenario I'll have a couple of security cams for my dad. 
You might check out the Foscam cams. I think they actually have an online support forum.