Local Runtime Setup

If you have not successfully completed the build part of the setup, do that first. These steps will not work otherwise.

After successful compilation, follow these steps to setup the FORDYCA runtime environment and run a basic foraging scenario on your local laptop.

Note

If you don’t want to go through this runtime setup each time you start a new shell, add whatever commands you run in the terminal to $HOME/.bashrc (or whatever the startup file for your shell is) to have them run automatically when you login.

  1. Update the system dynamic library search paths so the OS can find the libraries that the ARGoS executable requires (supposedly ARGoS will do this for you when you install it via ldconfig to /usr/local, but many people still have trouble with it). On bash:

    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/.local/system/lib/argos3:$HOME/.local/lib/argos3

    Assuming you passed --sysprefix=$HOME/.local/system and --rprefix=$HOME/.local to bootstrap.sh. If you passed something else, then update the path above accordingly.

  2. Update your PATH so that the shell can find ARGoS. On bash:

    export PATH=$PATH:/opt/.local/system/bin

    Assuming that you passed --sysprefix=$HOME/.local/systembin to bootstrap.sh. If you passed something else, then update the above path accordingly.

  3. Set the ARGOS_PLUGIN_PATH variable to contain (1) the path to the directory containing the libfordyca.so file, (2) the path to the ARGoS libraries. On bash, that is:

    export ARGOS_PLUGIN_PATH=/$HOME/.local/system/lib/argos3/lib:$HOME/research/fordyca/build/lib

    Assuming that you passed --sysprefix=$HOME/.local/system --rroot=$HOME/research to bootstrap.sh script when you built FORDYCA. If your paths are different, modify the above paths accordingly. Note that you need BOTH of these terms in the path, because this defines the ENTIRE search space for argos to look for libraries (including its own core libraries).

  4. Unless you compile out event reporting (built FORDYCA with optimizations AND with LIBRA_ER=NONE passed to cmake), you will need to set the path to the log4cxx configuration file, which tells FORDYCA which classes should have logging turned on, and how verbose to be. On bash that is:

    export LOG4CXX_CONFIGURATION=$HOME/research/fordyca/log4cxx.xml

    Assuming you have cloned and built FORDYCA in $HOME/research. If you cloned and built it somewhere else, then update the above path accordingly.

  5. cd to the ROOT of the FORDYCA repo, and run the demo experiment:

    argos3 -c $HOME/research/fordyca/exp/demo.argos

    This should pop up a nice GUI from which you can start the experiment (it runs depth0 dpo foraging by default). If the simulation seems to start but no GUI appears, verify that the <visualization> subtree of demo.argos file is not commented out.

Important

You should (probably) have n_threads set to 0 in the .argos file or omit the attribute altogether when running debug builds. When debugging you want things to be executed in a deterministic manner, and non-deterministic parallel execution with multiple threads should be used only for optimized builds once you are confident of code correctness.

Runtime Issues

Before reporting a bug, try:

  1. If you are getting a segfault when running ARGoS, verify that if you are running with Qt visualizations that the threadcount is 0 (Qt5 cannot run with multiple threads without segfaulting).

  2. Verify you don’t have any anaconda bits in your PATH. Depending on version, anaconda loads a DIFFERENT version of the Qt than fordyca uses, resulting in a dynamic linking error.

  3. Make sure you have the necessary environment variables set correctly.

  4. If you get a std::bad_cast, boost::get, or similar exception, then verify that the name of [controller, loop functions, qt user functions], match, as specified in XML Configuration are correct.