Discovering and exploiting active sensing motifs for estimation

Abstract: From organisms to machines, autonomous systems rely on measured sensory cues to estimate unknown information about themselves or their environment. For nonlinear systems, carefully selected sensor motion can be exploited to extract information that is otherwise unavailable, i.e. active sensing. Empirical, yet mathematically rigorous, tools are needed to (1) quantify how sensor movement can contribute to estimation performance, and (2) leverage this knowledge to improve state estimates. Here, we introduce "BOUNDS: Bounding Observability for Uncertain Nonlinear Dynamic Systems", and Python package pybounds, which can discover patterns of sensor motion that increase information for individual state variables. Crucially, it is suitable for partially observable nonlinear systems, accounts for sensor noise, and can be applied to either simulated or observed trajectories. We demonstrate BOUNDS through a case study on a flying agent with limited sensors, showing how active sensing can be leveraged to estimate key variables such as ground speed, altitude, and ambient wind direction. Finally, we present a framework to refine sporadic estimates from bouts of active sensing that combines data-driven state and observability estimation from artificial neural networks with model-based estimation, which we call the Augmented Information Kalman Filter (AI-KF). We validate our framework using altitude estimation given GPS-denied data from an outdoor quadcopter flight. Collectively, our work will help decode active sensing strategies and inform the design of estimation algorithms in sensorimotor systems.