Incorporating World Models in Decision Making for Next Best View Selection in Active Sensing

arXiv:2611.13229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient robotic 3D reconstruction requires selecting views that contribute new surface measurements with few physical captures. Pretrained world models can guide this choice, but a predicted surface may not produce valid depth measurements under the operating conditions of the deployed sensor. We present a deployment adaptation methodology for next-best-view selection that learns a sensor-return adapter from limited local calibration data while keeping the pretrained predictor fixed. The adapter estimates measurement dropout over each predicted surface, allowing the selection method to favor views likely to fill gaps in the measured reconstruction. In a real-robot experiment with a structured-light sensor, the adapted method achieves higher measured surface coverage with 60% fewer captures than nominal selection. The adapted method recovers a surface region that the nominal method repeatedly targets but fails to measure. These results suggest that robots can reuse pretrained predictive models while adapting their decisions to local operating conditions in data-scarce environments.