Activity Types
An activity type defines a simulated behavior that may be invoked by a planner, separate from the autonomous behavior of the mission model itself. Activity types may define parameters, which are filled with arguments by a planner and provided to the activity upon execution. Activity types may also define validations for the purpose of informing a planner when the parameters they have provided may be problematic.
For example, here is a simple activity type from the examples in the template mission model:
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Aerie automatically generates parameter serialization boilerplate for every activity type defined in the mission model's package-info.java. Moreover, the generated Model base class provides helper methods for spawning each type of activity as children from other activities.
Activity Type Annotations
In order for Aerie to detect an activity type, its class must be annotated with the @ActivityType tag. An activity type is declared with its name using the following annotation:
@ActivityType("CollectData")
By doing so, the Aerie annotation processor can discover all activity types declared in the mission model, and validate that activity type names are unique.
Activity Type Metadata
Metadata of activities are structured such that the Aerie annotation processor can extract this metadata given particular keywords. Currently, the annotation processor recognizes the following tags: contact, subsystem, brief_description, and verbose_description.
These metadata tags are placed in a Javadoc style comment block above the activity type to which they refer. For example:
/**
* @subsystem Data
* @contact camargo
* @brief_description A data management activity that deletes old files
*/
@ActivityType("DeleteOldFiles")