After looking too much into it, it seems SVO 2.0 will work best for the camera stuffs.
I may buy a 360 One VR 360° camera lens as a way to get started quickly with it.
A good alternative would be: https://www.banggood.com/de/Outdoor-Portable-11-LED-Camping-Light-Portable-Tent-Emergency-Lantern-p-1117018.html?p=W024148132309201612B&cur_warehouse=CN
It is low cost AF and looks like it would be easy to 3d print parts to make it work as a 360 deg lens.
Have found a great scholarly work on a vision system that parallels my own ideas: https://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11608&context=theses
Well I have come to the conclusion that I am not able to get the omni-directional camera working within the time that I want (this idea is not being abandoned, just put on hold). I will instead have to get a stereo camera rig. They (elp-stereo cameras) sell them on Amazon for about seventy bucks https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VG32EC2 and there are drivers for ROS http://wiki.ros.org/elp_stereo_camera that appear to be stable. Also I have decided to include a GPS on the design (GY-NEO6MV2 Board with Antenna Module for Arduino on ebay) drivers here: http://wiki.ros.org/ublox. This is done for increasing the amount of position data--I want to use as much as possible and fuse them all together to reduce any error as close to zero as possible with robot_localization. I will post the process of doing that as it is done here as a sub-page.
made: 7/28/18
edited: 5/29/21