A framework for active estimation: Application to Structure from Motion

State estimation is a fundamental and challenging problem in many applications involving planning and control, in particular when dealing with systems exhibiting nonlinear dynamics. While the design of nonlinear observers is an active research field, the issue of optimizing over time the transient response of the estimation error has not received, to the best of our knowledge, a comparable attention. In this paper, an active strategy for tuning the transient response of a particular class of nonlinear observers is discussed. This is achieved by suitably acting on the estimation gains and on the inputs applied to the system under observation. The theory is validated by simulation results applied to two visual estimation tasks (Structure from Motion — SfM).