%0 Conference Proceedings %F Spica13c %A Spica, R. %A Robuffo Giordano, P. %T A Framework for Active Estimation: Application to Structure from Motion %B IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, CDC'13 %C Firenze, Italy %X State estimation is a fundamental and challenging problem in many applications involving planning and control, in particular when dealing with systems exhibiting a nonlinear dynamics. While the design of nonlinear observers is an active research field, the issue of actively optimizing over time the convergence rate and/or transient behavior of the estimation error has not received, to the best of our knowledge, a comparable attention. In this paper, we characterize and tune the convergence rate/transient response of a particular class of nonlinear observers stemming from the adaptive control community. This is achieved by suitably acting on the estimation gains and on the inputs applied to the system under observation. The theory is validated by simulation results applied to two visual estimation tasks (structure from motion) %U http://rainbow-doc.irisa.fr/pdf/2013_cdc_spica.pdf %8 December %D 2013