SensorPerch: Sense Wherever and Whenever it Matters

2026-07-12

AI Summary

Traditional robotic perception is constrained by fixed or onboard sensors, limiting the ability to flexibly acquire task-optimal viewpoints. This work proposes SensorPerch, which decouples sensing from the robot body and environmental infrastructure by introducing autonomous, deployable, and retrievable sensor units as independent physical entities. Built upon a lightweight, wireless, reconfigurable sensor platform and a task-driven viewpoint selection framework, SensorPerch enables stable attachment to diverse surfaces and on-demand sensor placement. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in both object-coupled and policy-coupled tasks, achieving persistent long-range state monitoring and policy success rates comparable to those obtained with prior knowledge of the optimal viewpoint.

Abstract

Existing robotic perception is constrained by sensors that are either robot-mounted or permanently fixed in the environment, locking perception to a limited set of viewpoints. Yet as robots perform increasingly diverse tasks, the most informative viewpoint shifts from one task to the next-often somewhere onboard sensor and static infrastructure can not readily satisfy. To address this gap, we propose SensorPerch, a novel realization of active perception that decouples sensing from both the robot embodiment and the environment by treating sensors as independent physical entities that the robot can autonomously detach and re-attach within the environment. SensorPerch presents one realization of this paradigm: a lightweight, wireless, reconfigurable sensor platform that can perch on diverse surfaces, paired with a viewpoint-selection framework that determines task-optimal sensor placements. Together, these enable robots to construct task-relevant viewpoints on demand, independent of the robot's current position and available fixed infrastructure. We demonstrate the paradigm on two task classes: (i) object-coupled perception, where SensorPerch enables persistent object-state detection beyond the robot's current position, achieving successful event detection even when the robot is not nearby; and (ii) policy-coupled perception, where SensorPerch allows robots to construct diverse, policy-specific viewpoints for various policies, achieving success rates comparable to those obtained using oracle viewpoints.

Problem

• robotic perception
• viewpoint selection
• active perception
• sensor placement
• task-dependent sensing

Innovation

• active perception
• reconfigurable sensors
• task-driven viewpoint selection
• sensor decoupling
• robotic perception