The goal of this change is to improve readability of the code base by choosing a better name for the "sparse pose graph", e.g. "pose graph".
Renaming "sparse pose graph" to just "pose graph" conveys almost the same information, i.e. the word "sparse" is mostly noise. The concept of a pose graph is well known in SLAM. Of all the features that this pose graph has being "sparse" is not particularly extraordinary. The expected outcome is a more readable code base. We want to do this change before version 1.0 while we do not guarantee stable option names since it will be harder to do afterwards.
sparse_pose_graph
directories are renamedpose_graph
.SparsePoseGraph
classes are renamedPoseGraph
.sparse_pose_graph.lua
is renamedpose_graph.lua
and the wordsparse
is dropped from the options name.- dependent configuration files (including other repositories) have to be updated to use the new options name.
Sparse Pose Adjustment is an algorithm for optimizing a pose graph using a direct linear solver and inspired the current implementation in Cartographer. This is an implementation detail and might change in the future. Having a name that sounds as if it refers to the current inspiration of the implementation thus is an argument for changing the name.
No. The name refers to the sparsity of the graph not the pose. Removing "sparse" also gets rid of this misconception. A pose graph is a well known concept in SLAM, e.g. in the Sparse Pose Adjustment paper, 8 of the 9 mentions of a pose graph do not qualify it as "sparse".