This paper describes a novel approach to detecting orientation and identity of robots using a global vision system. Instead of additional markers, the original shape of the robot is used to determine an orientation using a general Hough transform. In addition the movement history as well as the command history are used to calculate the quadrant of the orientation as well as the identity of the robot. An empirical evaluation shows that the performance of the new video server is at least as good as that of a traditional approach using additional coloured markers. 1 Center for Imaging Technology and Robotics, University of Auckland