Multi-Agent ROS Experiments

Installation

This project uses submodules instead of system installations because it is under such heavy development. As a result, the nodes must be launched from inside a virtual environment to support local paths to projects/dependencies. The procedure for this is as follows:

Option 1: Using poetry

1. Configure your poetry projects to be able to use the system packages with poetry config virtualenvs.options.system-site-packages true. This must be set BEFORE the poetry project is installed.
2. Install the virtual environment with poetry install --no-root
3. Activate the virtual environemnt with poetry shell
4. cd back to the project workspace (where you can see the src folder)
5. Build the project with python -m colcon build --symlink-install (the symlink-install turns out to be important for path management)
6. Source the project with source install/setup.bash or source install/setup.zsh
7. Run your launch file, e.g., ros2 launch mar_bringup <launch file here>, for example: ros2 launch mar_bringup vehiclesec_infra.launch.py

Option 2: Using conda + poetry

TODO

Option 3: Using virtualenv

TODO

AVstack submodules -- IMPORTANT

This project makes heavy use of the AVstack submodules (avstack and avapi). Unfortunately, the other submodules (avstack-rosbridge and lib-avstack-trust) ALSO make use of those same submodules, making avstack and avapi second-order submodules. This can lead to version conflicts. The ideal solution to this problem would be to install a version of avstack and avapi with pip and have each of the other submodules use a symbiotic version of avstack and avapi. This solution is not possible because avstack and avapi are still under development and cannot be released yet to pypi. The solution we came up with is to add lib-avstack-core and lib-avstack-api as first-order submodules to this project and to change the paths of the dependencies of avstack-rosbridge and lib-avstack-trust on avstack and avapi to point to the first-order version and NOT their own second-order submodules.

All this is to say...when making changes to lib-avstack-core and lib-avstack-api, make the changes in multi-agent-ros/submodules/lib-avstack-core(api) and NOT in e.g., multi-agent-ros/submodules/avstack-rosbridge/submodules/lib-avstack-core.