Microduck PR absorbs maploc subcrate and dissects why relocalization never worked
victormustar · x · 2026-08-29
Pollen Robotics' open-source robot project microduck (1.1k stars) receives a PR absorbing maploc (mapping & localization) as a robotd-hosted subcrate, plus a detailed post-mortem on why results were "kinda ok but noisy" and relocalization never worked. It enumerates bugs each with the measurement that exposed them — e.g. sensor-origin asymmetry: maps were inked from the sensor world pose (10–15cm ahead of the body, moving with head yaw) while MCL and brute-force relocalize scored beams from the body pose; scans are now per-beam origin→endpoint pairs. All fixes were verified offline against recorded sessions via a replay bench shipped with the crate.
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