Week 1

1. Created a wiki following the instruction on the pdf linked in the canvas page.
2. Installed gridlab-d, HELICS, and cps-cosimulationenv

3. Made an error by cloning all three repositories separately, instead of following the instructions on the cps-cosimulation-env to stay in that repository.
4. Installed nix

1. We divided our group into two subgroups: Sensing and Integrating ROS with HELICS
2. Did research over the weekend about sensing materials on the robots and what could help make the robot better.

Week 2

1. I tried to run the shell for the example which was shown in the class but kept getting the error below

2. Created the conference template on overleaf for the midterm paper https://www.overleaf.com/7763997931rbvkzgfmhsng 3. Create the IPR Presentation on Google Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RdfrMkKp7M0g7XYb9GShKNSdWlxCu090HM3dekeRYrk/edit?usp=sharing 4. Created a shared research doc to document, collaborate and share thoughts within the group https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vUHT9XwADFZxCfK7lMaYlcHBuzMqFm49LTq8F0QHT9Q/edit?usp=sharing

1. The ROS/HELICS subteam members on friday to discuss a roadmap for the remainder of the semester and discuss on the difficulty of the brachiating robot. In this meeting we decided to change our focus from the brachiating robot to the UGV robot. We also came up with a couple of questions to ask the instructors regarding the development of the robot and how it would interact with HELICS. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7956250
2. We also decided to simulate a ROS Turtlebot with the help of Gazebo, but it is not compatible with MAC so we are trying to download an emulator to help with the mac users in our group.
3. Did research on sensing tools that are available to robots and how they interact with the Line Robot. All of this research is linked in the google docs pasted above.

Week 3

1. Worked on the IPR with the group to make sure that the presentation fit all of the requirements in the rubric.
2. Did independent research on my subgroup's subtask to develop a better knowledge on how we can use these sensors with the robot to make it more efficient.
3. I watched ~2hours of this video on the basics on c++ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLnPwxZdW4Y

Week 4

1. Worked on trying to find a common VM for the group to use and run ROS. We did not find a solution to this.
2. Started our research paper https://www.overleaf.com/7763997931rbvkzgfmhsng

1. Worked in class with our groups on our paper. We divided the group into their sections and what they would do in this research paper. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1143368942639923312/1163958839268348004/Screenshot_2023-10-17_at_5.56.48_PM.png?ex=658211a4&is=656f9ca4&hm=269b7b215a28bffc2ea130763c75863b3ae91f0e07683d127f364890470ee32c&

Week 4

1. Met with the group to go over what each of us had in our research.
2. Discussed our research with the group and organized the paper a little more https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_DBxcm6JhbefdVB7IRJYpBOHHIM0yq7N5bVzO3MCvfw/edit]

1. I was having problems with quoting in overleaf, but got it fixed by talking to instructors

. 2. Stayed in class and went over bugs in gridlab-d code and tried to run simplegridlab-d example, but still did not work. 3. Went through trouble trying to start google cloud while trying to set up a common VM, but did not have enough credits to keep it running.

Week 4

1. Tried troubleshooting the VNCviewer, but did not work so we ran the SSH shell to use the VM. We were not able to see the GUI due to the issues with VNC.

1. Did extensive research into ROS2 and how we can use it in our project. https://docs.google.com/document/d/106pOJ1IFnxWNJI_liCkaqqxCKaMXEOXBlofaf0nZfaA/edit

Week 5

1. I used this day to do some ROS tutorials on youtube to get some hands-on research. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg25GfA456o

1. Divided our group again to do more research into different software packages. HELICS - Safiy GridLab-D - Rahil, and Raj. ROS - Suraj and Isabella Installing VnC on the server - Hussein

Week 6

1. We reviewed the rubric for our presentation and tried to gather some new information for next presentation Presentation - "12/15 (Target Audience Calibration 3/5, Concept Clarity 4/5, Project Roadmap 5/5)

The presentation is much improved from the kickoff. Good Job!

The presentations biggest weakness was the intro/opening. The presentation became to technically focused too quickly, and skipped over important background like the overall objectives and how the revised plan meets those objectives. That being said, the students were clearly excited about their new concept so we were happy to see that. The concept clarity was much improved, as was the technical feasibility. The concept clarity should improve with additional class time background research. The team should now focus on micro technical demos to validate the approach and revising the intro before next presentation. The team should seek to make more specific the tangible goals and milestones, with particular emphasis on integration of those tasks. This is particularly true for the ROS/HELICS interface team. A Gantt chart may help with this and/or consider further revising the listed objectives to find and state dependnecies in tasks."

1. Went through documentation on ROS2 and Humble linked below. Decided to follow with Humble and not Rolling. https://github.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/turtlebot3/releases/tag/2.1.5

Week 7

1. Met with the group today to start a mock draft of our new presentation
2. Started an online crash course with ROS2

1. Went through bugs in code with instructors and tried to come up with a alternative solution to the VNCviewer error.
2. Started our presentation https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1I_N87Nr7LH8UvbbR0zB2Erq3luHvZWur0h_-rJcflmg/edit?usp=sharing

Week 8

1. The team met today to work on the presentation and work on the outlines. We divided the work up even more and tried to get a more solid baseline for the presentation

1. We presented our Presentation at class.

Week 9

1. We started our Final research paper https://www.overleaf.com/7763997931rbvkzgfmhsng

Week 1

1. I tried to run ubuntu on my laptop but could not figure out how to actually run it.

1. Our group met up to talk about the kick off presentation - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wfKMIMarJHZlLdrHP2mIvXGuAuns_ht-SCO553caG4s/edit?usp=sharing
2. The return members of our group put on a crash course for the new members to try and get them caught up.
3. As a group, we are each planning to do the ROS2 course online. While we are doing this over the next three weeks we will decide our subtasks for this project.

1. Worked on the presentation individually and got it finalized
2. I also got the talker and listener to work on ubuntu. I figured out to use terminator on the GUI to run the scripts

1. Presented virtually through discord.

Week 2

1. We met with our group to see where everyone is on the course.
2. During this session, we found out that the original crash course that we expected to do was paid. So we brainstormed and found some youtube videos that walks you through beginner modules. https://youtu.be/Gg25GfA456o?si=o8kbAG6r1MAwmYbB

1. I started the video tutorials, but then found it hard to follow along and was getting unexpected errors while trying to run $ brew install

1. During this class session I was trying to trouble shoot why brew commands were not working and why I could not get Xcode to work, but after discussing with a few group members I found out I was following the instructions for MacOS and not UBUNTU.
2. We also decided as a group to start browsing through this new documentation linked below. https://docs.ros.org/en/humble/Tutorials.html
3. The goal that we are trying to reach is to get to Beginner: Client libraries in the next two weeks and then from there we will divide into sub-groups within the team to cover more ground.

1. After figuring out that I was following the incorrect tutorials I started the Ubuntu tutorials.

2. I was able to install all the ROS2 packages onto the VNC server and play with the packages.

Week 3

1. While trying to play around with the Humble package I was getting unexpected errors in the VNC server.

2. I solved this by updating the packages and installing additional packages that were not included in the original download. 3. I was also able to get TurtleBot running on the server as seen below. However, I am unable to get the bot to move itself using the keys.

1. Our group did not meet this week over call and instead we updated the discord with our progress in the ROS2 course so far.
2. I seem to be way behind than everyone else in my group so I spent this doing the using turtlesim, ros2, and rqt and understanding nodes and topics modules in the tutorial
3. In the screenshot below I learned how to use rqt on the command line in UBUNTU but the while trying to look up the plug ins I was not able to find the /spawn service for the turtlesim.

.

1. I came back to the issue of not being able to find the /spawn service which shows the attributes that the turtlesim has. I looked at this forum and had a thought that I was running command line on the wrong window. I was supposed to be running the rqt command on the turtlesim_teleop_key.

2. I was also having difficulty trying to understand the nodes and how they interact with each other, but after using rqt GUI functionality attached below it made it easier to grasp the concept.

Week 4

1. This week I plan on finishing the CLI tools tutorial and learn more about the nodes in ROS2.
2. In the attached images below I was able to install colcon to set up a talker-listener node

3. TODO - Finish up the Beginner Client Library tutorials. - Finalize what sub group I should be on. - Start talking about Midterm Research Paper.

1. Since none of us finished the tutorials by the expected date, we are planning to finish and wrap up these tutorials by the end of the week.
2. We started to talk about the midterm research paper and divide up the groups based on what everyone's interest in the group is.

1. In class today we had a group stand up where we all mentioned how far we have progressed and if we have are having any issues.
2. During this class we were given advice on how to split up our teams for the assignment. We changed our goals for the semester to make it more feasible and not too stressful on the group.

Week 5

1. Successfully set up Subscriber-Publisher in UBUNTU in the picture below.

TODO:

• Finish Midterm paper
• Finish ROS2 documentation
• Research TurtleBot3
• Start TurtleBot3 tutorial
• Peer Eval

1. Started the midterm paper with the group and divided up each person's section https://www.overleaf.com/read/nynhvjwkyzgq#a7b985
2. For this paper, Me and Joseph did the TurtleBot3 section.
3. Completed the VIP Peer Eval

1. I was not in class today.
2. I was having troubles trying to start the TurtleBot3, but was having some troubles because it was using ROS Foxy which is an outdated version of ROS2 which we are not using.

Week 6

1. I was able to implement a publisher and subscriber method which can be used to mimic the talker-listener node model.

2. While I was working on completing the Beginner CLI tools, but was running into some problems while trying to run colcon build. I have tried to check the CMake.txt file, but had no luck on figuring out why it would not complete the build. While running rosdep commands it showed that all the files were correct.

1. At this team meeting we started the IPR1 presentation and divided up the groups into what tasks we chose for the midterm paper
2. For the presentation, I added TurtleBot3 slide and included a few pictures of the simulation.

1. Presented IPR1 in class.

Week 7

1. At this team meeting we planned to skim through HELICS documentation to get a better feel for how the integration of ROS2 and HELICS would work. We focused on integrating these two systems. Our goal was to assess potential challenges and develop a preliminary strategy for the integration process, ensuring compatibility.

1. I kept getting this error message above while trying to open up GAZEBO on Ubuntu which shows that there is a malformed entry in one of the APT source lists. 2. To fix this, I used - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59291199/malformed-entry-1-in-list-file I had to use the "sudo" function to remove the malformed file list which was not allowing me to delete the file originally. After successfully deleting the file I get a list of the new packages and then reinstalled VirtualBox.

1. In this group meeting in class, I talked in my stand up on how I have started to run GAZEBO on UBUNTU. I mentioned how i was having problems trying to install the Gazebo packages so me and Joseph tried to debug this issue.
2. During this group session, one of the group members who was working on integrating ROS and HELICS showed the group a demonstration of a publisher/subscriber "Hello, World!".
3. During this class session Will and Sam also gave brief seminar in Wireshark.

Week 8

1. Met with our group to talk about our subteam assignment of GAZEBO and the issues we were facing. At this time we were facing issues with finding documentation of GAZEBO since a lot of the documentation is out dated and the application itself does not have a lot of functionalities.
2. Started to discuss about the ROS/HELICS integration and how we might get it to work.

1. Today was basically a solo work day on trying to get Gazebo to run and experiment with it.
2. I installed GAZEBO using this and tried to play around with it.
3. I was having trouble with 'gz harmonic'

1. Did the weekly stand up meeting with the entire class and discussed on our setbacks with Gazebo and how we can overcome it.
2. Found out the type of Gazebo that I was running was compatible with Ubunutu 22.04 and not the one I was running.
3. I found tips here on how to debug this issues.

Week 9

1. The group met to talk about the progress that we have made so far in each our assignments.
2. The integration group had huge updates on their part since they were able successfully integrate ROS and HELICS with a small code example.
3. From here the next step was to integrate GridLab-D and run the class example

1. For my work day today, I decided to take a break from Gazebo nightmare and instead tried the ros-helics team's tutorial on how to integrate the subscriber and publisher
2. I kept getting this error while running 'colcon build' and kept getting cannot find source file.

3. [This](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43400453/cmake-cannot-find-source-file-add-executable) was the most information I could find online about the missing source file so I decided to call it a day since I would have to troubleshoot this with the ros-helics teams

1. I was not able to complete the tutorial I was following because of the build error i kept getting.
2. While troubleshooting with my group in class, I was able to check the directory manually if the file existed which it did. I think the problem I am having is that the tutorial is using the calling the wrong address which would explain the error.

3. During this time, our team also assessed each of our contributions and if we had any problems with the specific sub teams we all chose and if we wanted to change our tasks. Everyone seemed to like where they were so it was fine.

Week 11

1. Our team had a mini hackathon today to demo the ROS-HELICS integration of the publisher and subscriber using the made from scratch code. During this session we all tried to run the script in our own VM and it was not working for me.

2. This issue was resolved by using ' sudo make install ' instead of ' make install '

1. Since we met with our group the day before I used this day as my personal work day.
2. Today I decided to take a step back from Ubuntu and Gazebo and do some more research into building a robot in an SDF.
3. I also took a closer look into SDFs at this GitHub

1. During this session we did our weekly stand up and at this session I talked about the lack of documentation on Gazebo.
2. I also tried to get Gazebo to work and run a simple example below which ran a simulation where there were 3D objects in a plane and I was able to interact with them as seen below.

Week 12

1. I kept getting the error while trying to run colcon build from Sabina's repo. TO fix this error, i recloned the HELICS repo and then ran 'sudo make install' and then ran colcon build again which I was successful in doing.

2. After fixing that issue i was able to run Sabina's simple Hello World example successfully.

1. We had a brief subteam meeting to discuss progress in each of our select subteams.
2. I also got some help debugging and understanding some of the code that Sabina used to create her Hello world application with the publisher and subscriber.

1. Today was a brief meeting with the group in class where we talked about our progress again and checked in on if anyone needed help with their tasks.
2. This was a relatively short session so we decided to just postpone the task delegation to the next subteam meeting so we could get our affairs in order.

Week 13

1. We had a brief discord session where the Gazebo subteam talked about their progress and what the future steps are to integrate ROS2 and Gazebo.
2. We also briefly talked about the presentation and divided up the subsections into slides to start working on it.

1. I worked on the [presentation].(https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aM4M4pZJlwo5GOHF-WE0dNjA1v5fH6Mi2wvGKIGDnaM/edit?usp=sharing)
2. For the presentation I worked on the Physical Environment slides specifically the environments, resources, setbacks faced, improvement and problem resolution, and future directions and goals.

1. Presented IPR2 to the class on our progress so far and what the future steps are for the upcoming semester.

Week 14

1. I decided to get a head start on our final paper.
2. For the final paper I shifted the images of the Gazebo simulations and research to the end along with the pictures that the other subteams had.
3. I also worked on the updating the Gazebo section of the paper by adding and building upon information that our group put in the final presentation.

1. I met with the group to go over the final paper one last time and made some finishing touches.

1. Medical leave with dean absence

1. Attended subteam meeting - going to work on setting up docker again.
2. Have to catch up with peer notebooks.
3. Working on the Physical environment subteam.

1. Spent some time reading through peers notebooks and past semester final presentation.
2. Also took some time to redownload ros 2 and rerun docker.
3. Getting up to date and setting up for the week.

1. I redownloaded VNC Viewer and Docker to set up and run ROS 2 and Ignition for simulation. I encountered issues when trying to run sudo apt update, which did not let me set up my environment. I will trouble shoot into so I can run ROS2 locally.

2. I also was able to run the GAZEBO simulation for the basic shapes sdf to get some refreshers from the semester I missed.

1. I spent most of the time researching SDFs and how to create my own world in Gazebo http://sdformat.org/tutorials
2. I was trying to create my own world but was running into gazebo installation problems, but after debugging I found out the Ubuntu repos do not have gazebo available after which I installed.

1. I spent most of my time trying to debug my gazebo booting issues. I keep getting a Package 'gazbeo' has no installation candidate. I think this is because I might be running a later version of Ubuntu or because I am using a old version of ROS 2. I am going to try to download ROS2 Humble again.

2. I figured out that the issue was being caused by a missing GPG key for the OSRF repo. Ubuntu does not allow keys to be stored so i needed to manually add the correct key and associate it with the repo.

1. We had our standup meeting this morning which was consistent of everyone talking about the work for the next week.
2. Joseph and I tried to figure out the gazebo issues that I was running into on Ubuntu, but were not able to find out. I am going to make a stackoverflow post to figure this out.
3. I also went through the github to see the updates that Safiy and Sabina made.

1. Cloned all of the GitHub repos to my Ubuntu VM

2. Planning on meeting with Safiy and Sabina to get their branches running on my laptop and possibly a demo of the integration which was worked on in the previous semester.

1. I was able to attend the guest speaker lecture since my conflicting class got cancelled.

1. During todays stand up meeting we discussed our updates and ideas for the midterm paper. We focused on what parts of the paper we needed to fix and remove. I wanted to change the ROS2 section because the information seemed redundant and outdated.

1. I worked on the Midterm paper today. I went through and added Gazebo and Ubuntu issues into the paper and refined the ROS2 section and steps to install since I was going through a lot of issues to reinstall it on my mac this semester.

1. We had our subteam meeting today where we went over progress and started distributing tasks for our upcoming presentation. I talked with Joseph about Docker issues and not being able to run the container on my laptop (maybe configuration issues) - more to diagnose. We also talked about NAV2 installations and how to set it up in Ubuntu. We also started plannign the topic structure for out fault detection component.

1. I was able to successfully download and run the Docker container on my laptop. The next issue I have to deal with is working the ros_helics.gz files (has integration framework which connects ROS2 and HELICS). My goal is to extract and test the contents within the Docker environment. This is also how I got Gazebo running. Still working through some issues with dependencies and paths.

2. I was able to build and launch the docker container which contains ROS2, HELICS, NAV2. 

1. I mainly used today to work on the slides for the midterm presentation.
2. Attached below are the screenshots of the slides that i worked on - Physical Environments and Next steps
3. I was not able to make as much progress as I hoped to regarding SDFs and creating a custom SDF to test robots in a simulation, but will try to have a demo before the final presentation

1. We presented out midterm presentation today and it was my first day back in class after my surgery.
2. We got some feedback about the order of our slides and how the mission statement was supposed to be in the beginning not in the middle of the deck.
3. Will also gave us helpful notes and tips on new ideas (SROS and NAV2 integration) into the docker image.

1. Not a lot of people showed up for the subteam meeting since we were mainly working on the slides and midterm paper.
2. We gave updates over discord and i scheduled some time with Joseph to figure out the docker issues that i was having.
3. Planning on meeting with Joseph in the next couple of days and do some more research about SDFs.

1. I got some help from Joseph in debugging the issues i was running into while trying to run gazebo on my laptop.
2. We figured out the gazebo issue was a dependency issue and that the GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH variable did not exist so we had to add that. We also had to tweak the installation of ROS2 and a couple other packages to prevent version conflicts.

3. The other issue that I was having was not having enough space on my laptop to download the image because I was running images from 2-3 years ago (CS 2110 and previous CPS images) 4. To fix this i ran ```bash docker system prune --all --volumes ``` to remove all the unused docker images and then pulled the image again which got it working

1. Met with Joseph again to prepare the NAV2 container for integration.
2. I reviewed Natalies notebook on NAV2 information and installation procedures.
3. Also documented notes on NAV2 documentation and tutorials here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r32Ms777325XkXB4RCAaM5LcxMpUcukzDY6dZfuDoa8/edit?usp=sharing

1. Followed the steps at the link to install ROS2 and NAV https://docs.ros.org/

en/rolling/Installation/Ubuntu-Install-Debs.html 2. I was able to succesfully install ROS2 rolling onto the UBUNTU VM. 3. TODO: - Run ROS2 Rolling and validate integration with GAZEBO - Try to run NAV2 and validate - Have some visuals and run programs to start building physical environment

SPRING BREAK

• Hit “unable to locate package ros-humble-navigation2” on Ubuntu (noble)
• Discovered our /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list was still pointing at jammy removed it and re-added the ROS 2 repo for noble over HTTP
• Ran sudo apt update and confirmed no nav2 binaries exist for Rolling/Humble on noble

a ### 3/26 - Switched to building Navigation2 from source in `~/nav2_ws/src/navigation2` - `colcon build` failed in `nav_2d_msgs` with **ModuleNotFoundError: em** → installed `python3-empy` system-wide, but our venv still couldn’t see it - Fixed venv permissions (`sudo chown -R $USER /software/venv`) and ran `pip install empy` inside the activated venv

• Next error: ModuleNotFoundError: lark from rosidl_parser
• Installed lark-parser into the venv via sudo /software/venv/bin/pip install lark-parser
• Re-ran colcon build --symlink-install, nav2 packages generated correctly this time

TODO

• Parameterize simulation setup (spawn poses, model scales, launch arguments)
• Automate orchestration & fault injection scheduling
• Develop visualization & telemetry dashboard
• Integrate user control interfaces
• Scale to additional federates and robotic agents
• Finalize documentation, tutorials, and FAQs
• Plan next-semester roadmap and assign milestones

1. Joseph shared our recent progress during the subteam meeting on Discord. He linked the repository we've been using to adjust the VM to the package page, so the documentation is now visible and up to date. The README.md from the repo syncs directly to the container page here: https://github.com/cps-vip/helics-dockerfiles/pkgs/container/cps-vip-vm. I’m planning to open a new branch soon to start exploring HELICS-GLD syncing.

1. Started working on the slides for the final presentation.
2. Start to update slides with SDF and Physical Environment information.

1. Wrapped up editing my VIP presentation slides and added audio to the slides since I wont be able to make it.

1. Submitted the final slide deck to canvas

1. I was not able to attend the presentation due to a test in another class at the same time, but received feedback from Physical Environment team. ** Implement automated health-check scripts for federates
   ** Add a telemetry dashboard for real-time monitoring
   ** Expand logging to include QoS acknowledgments

1. Decided to not postpone meeting as the only progress we needed to work on our final paper.
2. Began drafting the Past, Current, and Future progress sections in our document template.
3. Scheduled a sync with Physical Environment team to coordinate future semester tasks.

1. Submitted FINAL PAPER!