From 09f138a25365ba8016cb2f3b8a219ec070a21cef Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Elvin Yang <eyy@umich.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2024 13:50:09 -0500
Subject: [PATCH] Add ARCHITECTURE.md

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 ARCHITECTURE.md | 41 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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+# Package Organization
+
+This repository is a ROS 2 wrapper around the Ultralytics YOLOv8 library. As is
+standard with learning-based Python packages, a virtual environment is used to
+avoid Python dependency conflicts with other packages on the system. Virtual
+environments appear to be incompatible with the standard ROS 2 Python package
+architecture, thus `ament_cmake` is used instead of `ament_python`.
+
+## Virtual Environment Specification
+
+`pyproject.toml`, `poetry.lock`, and `poetry.toml` are used by the Poetry
+dependency manager to set up a virtual environment. `pyproject.toml` contains
+the editable list of Python dependencies used by the package. In general,
+`poetry.lock` and `poetry.toml` do not need to be manually edited.
+
+## `yolov8_ros/`
+
+This folder contains this package's ROS 2 nodes. ROS 2 nodes are implemented as
+modules with the suffix `_node` and must contain a `main()` function that can
+accept zero arguments. Nodes are not meant to be imported by other Python
+modules. `parameters.py` contains the sets of ROS 2 parameters declared by each
+node and their accompanying documentation.
+
+## ROS 2 Files
+
+### Package and Build System Files
+
+`package.xml` is a required ROS 2 package specification file.
+
+`CMakeLists.txt` defines where files and folders in this repository are copied
+or linked during the ROS 2 workspace build and install process.
+
+### Runtime Files
+
+`launch/` contains ROS 2 launch files.
+
+`scripts/python_entrypoint.py` is an internal script used to run Python modules
+within the virtual environment from launch files. See additional documentation
+at the top of this file.
+
+`rviz2/` contains saved configuration files for the `rviz2` tool.