{"ID":23475940,"CreatedAt":"2026-09-18T01:09:05.407443952Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-09-20T18:11:56.143995915Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19510","arxiv_id":"2609.19510","title":"PIVOT: Perception-aware Independent Viewpoint Online Optimization","abstract":"A fundamental assumption in robotic perception is that the sensor's field of view (FoV) is fixed relative to the robot body. Motion-decoupled sensors, such as gimbal-mounted cameras and MEMS-based LiDARs, instead allow sensing direction to be controlled independently at runtime. This freedom creates a computational challenge: efficiently selecting useful viewing directions online in feature-dense environments. We propose PIVOT, a lightweight iterative method that optimizes sensor viewing direction along a fixed translation trajectory to maximize feature visibility. Under a conical FoV model, visibility depends only on the optical axis, yielding a two-degree-of-freedom optimization on the viewing sphere $S^2$. Coordinate-free $SO(3)$ exponential-map updates enable efficient continuous optimization without explicit angular parameterizations or exhaustive viewing-sphere search. Monte Carlo evaluations retain 98.1--99.6% of brute-force visibility with a 76--85x speedup. Photorealistic simulation and real-world experiments further demonstrate improved visual localization robustness and practical viewpoint control on a quadruped robot.","short_abstract":"A fundamental assumption in robotic perception is that the sensor's field of view (FoV) is fixed relative to the robot body. Motion-decoupled sensors, such as gimbal-mounted cameras and MEMS-based LiDARs, instead allow sensing direction to be controlled independently at runtime. This freedom creates a computational cha...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19510","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.19510v1","authors":"[\"Yuyang Chen\",\"Shekoufeh Sadeghi\",\"Charuvahan Adhivarahan\",\"Elton Lemos\",\"Chen Wang\",\"Sanjeev J. Koppal\",\"Karthik Dantu\"]","published":"2026-09-16T23:53:04Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}