Control Action START has no effect

[dmronga]

Hi,

me again. Still using Rock/Mars master on Ubuntu 16.04. When I send the value PAUSE on the control_action input port of the Mars Task, the simulation pauses. But then, when I send START it does not start again, but keeps being paused. Am I missing something or is there something wrong with the method startStopTrigger() used here

simulation-orogen-mars/tasks/Task.cpp

Line 491 in a6ea2a4

simulatorInterface->startStopTrigger();

?

Best,
Dennis

[planthaber]

Hi, looks like the bug is withing the Mars:
https://github.com/rock-simulation/mars/blob/master/sim/src/core/Simulator.cpp#L470
The state is not set to Stopped there.

But the Simulator also has these methods directly:

virtual void StartSimulation() = 0;
virtual void StopSimulation() = 0;

so perhaps it would be better to use them.

[planthaber]

rock-simulation/mars#83

[malter]

The simulation status is changed to stopped in the simulation thread after the current processed simulation step ends. If this is not happening, a simulation plugin might blocks the thread. Maybe one of the orogen MARS plugins is not returning from the update call?

[malter]

Maybe the status is set but the simulation is not waking up, you can try to add
stepping_wc.wakeAll(); in line 471 of the simulation/mars/sim/src/core/Simulator.cpp

[dmronga]

@planthaber I already tried that and it works for me.

But I don' t know if using StartSimulation() / StopSimulation() directly in the Mars orogen component might have some unintended side effects. E.g. when I sent PAUSE, RESET and START quickly after each other, the Mars component crashed after I applied this change.

[malter]

I added the wakeAll() call in the develop branch of MARS. Did it solve your problem? If not, there must be something blocking the simulation thread, and I will spend a closer look into your specific setup.