Pan tilt zoom camera

edit

Here is a list of supported cameras in ROS. Additionally, there exist camera drivers for other types of camera. For example, my company uses the Axis 214 PTZ camera. It's a network camera with pan/tilt/zoom and also with audio capabilities. It provides 704x576 maximum resolution at 60 fps. It also comes with its own programming API to control the pan-tilt-zoom. Drivers can be found here.

EDIT: All Axis cameras provide a control API known as Vapix. This is a HTTP-based programming library. You essentially send web-scripts to the HTTP server that's running on the camera. The camera then returns a message that expresses success or failure, etc. To program with ROS, you'd need to convert ROS commands to simple Vapix messages, send them over UDP, and then parse the response into ROS-readable format. I think the Axis 214 uses Vapix 2.0, but I'm not entirely sure. Google will tell you for sure.

As for mounting the Kinect on the camera, I don't see a reason that you couldn't do that. It would certainly look interesting to say the least. You'd just have to be careful to leave room for the camera to rotate properly, but that shouldn't be difficult.