Hacker News Reader

In 2007 for the DARPA Urban Challenge, the Benn Franklin Racing Team used Matlab for their car. The entire thing ran on 5000 lines of code compared to similar performing cars written in C/C++ which used over 100K lines of code.

http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlpressroom/pdf/Articles/The...

View on HN

Well that makes sense, given that basically all machine learning is transformations over matrices and that is Matlab's bread and butter. The equivalent C code might perform better when optimized, but it is going to be far longer and uglier. There's a reason a lot of ML work is prototyped out in Matlab first.

I would say basically all of robotics is transformations over matrices. As for Little Ben, there was actually no machine learning involved. Planning was sample-based on an occupancy grid. Localization was map-based.

That is true, and was very impressive. Consider how expressive matlab is though - x = A\b is one line in a .m file, but can correspond to several hundred of lines of fortran.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com