CARMEN Update Record

The chief changes from Carmen 0.4.5 to 0.4.6 are:

• There is no more people tracking in localize. This functionality will be in a separate module in the future.
• All quantities are reported in world coordinates. Nothing, including the particle message, is reported in anything other than world coordinates.
• The guts of localize have a library interface, called liblocalizecore.a.
• Localize now emits a weighted sample mean in response to every laser reading. By incorporating the weights given the current observation, (whether or not it is actually incorporated), the resulting mean scans are SUBSTANTIALLY more accurate than before.
• Global localization is potentially faster and more accurate.
• There is a new option called use_scanmatching, which uses gradient descent to fine-tune the output of localize.
• Localizegraph is no more. navigator_panel does everything you might need.

The chief changes from Carmen 0.4.4 to 0.4.5 are:

• map_gridmap and navigator_map messages have been changed
• a bug in the zlib support is fixed.
• param_server now has the ability to change maps without restarting. Of course, navigator, localize, etc still have to be restarted when maps change

The chief changes from Carmen 0.4.3 to 0.4.4 are:

• lots of bug fixes
  
• added navigator support for driving to positions *and* orientations
  
• added ability to turn off collision prevention at run-time.
  
• better control of driving the robot backwards
  
• zlib support for log files
  
• param_edit indicates uncommitted variable changes.