DeltaSeek: Toward Active Perception in Evolving Construction Environments

Sanjay Acharjee, Md Nazmus Sakib

Construction environments evolve continuously, causing large geometric changes that degrade static mapping and registration performance. This necessitates active perception, where robots deliberately select sensing configurations to resolve the environment's current state. We present DeltaSeek, an initial framework toward active perception in evolving built environments. While our broader objective is a system that reasons about where, how, and when to observe, this paper addresses a critical prerequisite: how a robot's sensing embodiment constrains the observations it can acquire. We formalize an embodiment's permissible observation set and evaluate with a Husky A300 equipped with a UR5e on an IFC-derived benchmark under chassis-mounted and wrist-mounted RGB-D configurations, scoring observations by geometric visibility and effort by drivable distance. In a room-scale scene with eight controlled changes spanning four observability conditions, exhaustive evaluation over 240 permissible base poses and five arm postures shows that two changes admit no chassis viewpoint whatsoever, while the wrist camera resolves both. For changes observed by both embodiments, the median base travel…