Whilst there is a big song and dance about the Kinect progress on Sentience continues. Since they're not prohibitively expensive and I have plenty of time on my hands I'll try to acquire a Kinect and evaluate how suitable it is for robotics uses. Willow Garage already seem to be doing something Kinect related.

A new dense stereo algorithm called ELAS, developed by Andreas Geiger, has been added to the v4l2stereo utility. This works well and at a reasonable frame rate on the Minoru. It's probably the best dense stereo method that I've tried to date.

http://code.google.com/p/sentience/wiki/MinoruWebcam

It may turn out that the structured light method which the Kinect uses isn't very useful outdoors, or suffers from interference when multiple units are used in close proximity, so there may still be a place for stereo vision as a depth sensing method.