These seems to be much more robotics / autonomous vehicle focused? I don't quite see the mass surveillance angle you get from this you don't already get from cheap ubiquitous cameras, basic computer vision and networking (aka flock) .

I think you've made the erroneous assumption that the researchers care. I work in 3D reconstruction and I've not really seen too many people care about the actual use case, and indeed have had some friends join defence.

I mean, i think if you want to perform mass surveilance, you can do it far cheaper and more efficiently via facial recognition, mobile phone surveillance and a variety of different other methods.

If you want reconstruction and training of robotic movement, this is far more appropriate. I believe we're going to see robots being able to "dream" in terms of analysing historical video information on spaces and improving movement and navigation.

So not mass surveilance, but probably there's a future of mass subjugation using robot enforcement.

I'm not sure what you mean. The input video feed already constitutes "surveillance". You'd need cameras everywhere and if you have a camera, you can also just use regular models like China already does.