Soar Test Agent for Development

The start program is a minimum working example of a Soar agent integrated in ROS2 for communicating. It is used for testing but also as an example on how to set up the project structure.

The typical setup follows this pattern:

1. Create a SoarRunner node.

2. Call node->addAgent(name, soar_file) — this returns a std::shared_ptr<SoarAgent>.

3. Wire all ROS2 interfaces directly on the returned agent:

   • agent->addPublisher(...) / agent->addSubscriber(...)

   • agent->addService(...) / agent->addClient(...)

4. Call node->startThread() to begin the Soar decision cycle.

Multiple agents can be created by calling addAgent() repeatedly. Each agent has its own I/O wiring; all agents share the same kernel and are advanced together via m_kernel->RunAllAgents(1) on every step of the run thread. The updateWorld() callback (triggered by smlEVENT_AFTER_ALL_OUTPUT_PHASES) then iterates over all SoarAgent instances and calls their updateWorld().

The tests can be executed either via colcon test or launch_test test/*.py.

Known Bug: Soar does not exit cleanly after unit tests and the start program must be terminated manually.