Devlog #5

I thought it would be an interesting day today, as I was going to add something important that will help a robot perceive and predict the world.

Instead, I spent most of my time reading research papers.

At first I thought I could just implement a World Model and move on.

After reading more robotics papers, I realised everyone seems to solve the problem differently.

• Some approaches use occupancy grids.
• Some track objects.
• Some build semantic maps.
• Some focus almost entirely on probabilistic state estimation.

I couldn’t find a single approach that worked well across every scenario.

That changed my view of how I wanted to build this part of CORES.

Instead of picking one approach that works only in one scenario, I started implementing multiple approaches instead of one.

The plan

1. Implement them.
2. Benchmark them.
3. See where each one performs well.
4. Let the results decide which one should become the default.

One thing I realised

While doing this, I also realised that calling everything a “World Model” was a bit misleading.

The runtime isn’t trying to store the world.

It’s trying to estimate what the world currently looks like based on observations.

That made “State Estimation” feel like a much better name for the implementation.

The architecture didn’t really change.

Only the implementation became clearer.

It was mostly about changing how I think about this part of the project.

I think spending a day reading papers and redesigning things will save me weeks of rewriting later.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it’s important to build the clearest picture possible of a feature before implementing it.

About the papers

Just to be clear, the papers and images below are existing robotics research.

I’m not claiming them as my own.

I’m studying different approaches before deciding how to implement this part of CORES.

Progress today

• Surveyed different robotics approaches
• Planned multiple State Estimation strategies
• Started implementing competing approaches
• Added benchmark framework
• Wrote more tests
• Refactored the architecture
• Renamed the implementation to State Estimation