I am doing some robotics projects but my main area of interest is trying out several algorithms for the processing of the stream of data coming from the video.
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Same for me! From what I can tell, a cheap webcam will "just work" with a recent version of windows - i.e. plug it in using USB and then you can have programmatic access to the data and grab frames very easily. This setup works fine with my digital camera working as a webcam - real £10 webcams should be the same. Not sure what Linux compatibility is like these days - for that I know for a fact that the Hauppauge USB WinTV thing works (or at least the hardware version I have works) with Linux.
For linux I found this (now on the wayback archive - original page is now 404): http://web.archive.org/web/20020322015936/http://staff.aist.go.jp/naoyuki.ichimura/research/tips/v4ln_e.htm
Hopefully that is some help.
Oh by the way, speed on a modern machine shouldn't be an issue - my badly written prototype in visual basic of all things (dont laugh - seemed like a good idea at the time!) was tracking a single coloured object reliably at significantly greater than 30fps (it automatically altered the window it searched in based on size and amount of movement of the object - at times it was approaching 100fps) on a modest by today's standards 1.4ghz pc, using a 320x240 stream.
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