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by lynaghk 404 days ago
That's a reasonable idea, but unfortunately wouldn't work in my case since the simulation relies on a lot of scientific libraries in Python and I need the inversion to happen on the microcontroller.

When you say "coordinate descent" do you mean gradient descent? I.e., updating a potential pose using the gradient of a loss term (e.g., (predicted sensor reading - actual sensor reading)**2)?

I bet that would work, but a tricky part would be calculating gradients. I'm not sure if the Python libraries I'm using support that. My understanding is that automatic differentiation through libraries might be easier in a language like Julia where dual numbers flow through everything via the multiple dispatch mechanism.

1 comments

Ah makes sense.

No, coordinate descent is a stupider gradient-optional method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate_descent

It's slow and sub-optimal, but the code is very easy to follow and you don't have to wonder whether your gradient is correct.