Lie algebra se3

nalgebra
1

Hi again :slight_smile:
In a current project of mine, representations of transformations are often needed to be converted between the Lie group SE3 and it’s Lie algebra se3. In a C++ code base, I’ve seen Sophus used for those cases. I didn’t find anything mentionned about this in /r/rust. I was wondering if some of the people in this forum knew about a rust project already taking care of this? Otherwise, I don’t mind recoding the functions I will need based on nalgebra, but we often make small mistakes along the road so that’s why I’m asking.

2

Hi! I am not aware of any crate that deal specifically with lie groups/lie algebra. So if you end up writing functions you need and don’t mind open-sourcing them, maybe some could be integrated to nalgebra or may result in a new crate!

3

I definitely cannot do something nalgebra-quality-like with my basic rust skills ^^ but I don’t mind at all opensourcing my experiments to serve as a concrete example use case. This use case is basically minimizing a non linear optimization problem with a Gauss-Newton approach for tracking of a camera (visual odometry). Transformation steps are expressed as small Lie algebra elements. I’ll link here more details (or problems, who knows XD) when I’m further in the code.

4

I’m trying to setup tests to compare rotations before and after a round trip to and from Lie algebra. I need to have approximate comparisons. I’ve seen that the Rotation type has trait AbsDiffEq, so I have added the approx crate to my dev dependencies. Yet when I’m trying to use it, I get the error message

the trait approx::AbsDiffEq is not implemented for nalgebra::Unit<nalgebra::Quaternion<f32>>.

The function tested:

#[test]
fn log_exp_round_trip() {
    let rotation = UnitQuaternion::from_euler_angles(0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
    assert_abs_diff_eq!(
        rotation,
        round_trip_from_group(rotation),
        epsilon = EPSILON_ERROR
    );
}

Is there something I’m doing wrong? (my basic so3 and se3 modules are on github but I didn’t commit the approximate tests yet, still a work in progress).

EDIT: turns out I had put approx 0.3 in my Cargo.toml and I just realized that nalgebra is based on version 0.2 of approx and they are not compatible apparently. Switched back to 0.2 and it works :slight_smile: I miss Elm semantic versioning ^^

5

Thanks for mentioning this, I’ll update the approx dependency to 0.3 tomorrow!

6

You’re welcome ^^

So I have basically finished rewriting the so3 and se3 transformations I’ll need for my optimization problem. They are inspired by the implementation in Sophus but have few differences that I think are better. I’ve added quicktests to make sure round trips give the initial value back. Nothing is generic (I’ve used f32) but I think you can have a look at the implementation now if you are interested. I’m also open to any feedback.

Module so3: https://github.com/mpizenberg/computer-vision-rs/blob/master/src/so3/mod.rs

Now I’m gonna try to use them for my next rust challenge :crossed_fingers:

1 Like
7

That looks pretty good! While that line is fine, you could just use fields of Matrix3 instead of indexing here, and use Vector3::new instead of Vector3::from_colum_slice:

Vector3::new(mat.m32, mat.m12, mat.m21);

You can also construct a Matrix3 with ::new so that, e.g., this becomes:

Matrix3::new(
    0.0, -w3, w2,
    w3, 0.0, -w1,
    -w2, w1, 0.0
)
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