State Vector

So far, you’ve seen that the state of a car contains multiple values which we’ve been putting into a Python list.

However, these values are typically contained in one data type: a state vector.

A vector is similar to a list in Python, in that it contains multiple values, but they are mathematically very different.

What is a Vector?

A vector is a kind of matrix, which for now you can think of as a grid of numbers, and matrices are a math data type, similar to something like an integer or a float.

And similar to an integer or a float, we can multiply matrices, scale them, add two of them together and so on!

This is called linear algebra, and linear algebra will come up again and again in self-driving car systems. It’s in everything from:

car movement calculations
deep learning applications, and
image and video analysis

In this section, we’ll see how state vectors and matrices can be used together to help us efficiently predict a new state, and localize a car.

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