Getting Started

Getting Started#

NavAbility fundamentally organizes mapping, localization, and perception data (a.k.a. navigation data) by means of a visual graphical model known as factor graphs. See the related documentation on Graph Concepts for more information about what factor graphs.

Free guest@navability.io access#

A free tier access to NavAbility servers is provided through the user guest@navability.io. To learn more about using the guest user, consider trying the NavAbility Tutorials.

Privacy and Auth Token#

A user specific authentication token is needed whether you are just accessing an existing graph, modifying, adding data, or building a whole new graph directly through the SDK. At present, the only way to obtain a temporary authentication token is through the NavAbility App on the “Connect” page (or from the App, use the burger menu top left to access the Connect page). A user login to NavAbility is needed before an auth token can be provided. Auth tokens last for 24 hours, and should be kept private to each session or usage. Do not store or share the token with others. See below for getting a login if you do not already have one.

Installing#

The NavAbilitySDK can be installed as a usual Python pip package to a virtual environment (more info venv and pip info here):

cd ~/my/working/dir
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

and install the package to current active environment (or tosystem global if not in an venv)

pip install navabilitysdk

Installing from within a Python kernel can also be done using:

# Install a pip package inside a Jupyter kernel
# import sys
# !{sys.executable} -m pip install navabilitysdk

Starting a Python REPL and Importing#

To use the NavAbility SDK example in a REPL, together with a virtual environment

python3 venv /path/to/user/venv

Loading the SDK module:

from navability.entities import *
from navability.services import *
from uuid import uuid4
import numpy as np
# import asyncio

See also

The NavAbility and Caesar.jl design promote distributed factor graph workflows for both edge and cloud usage. The NavAbilitySDK is part of a larger architecture where both client and server side computations are used. The rest of this page illustrates usage against the server side data and computations. Reach out to NavAbility via Slack or info@navability.io for more help.

Warning

Earlier versions of NavAbilitySDK.py had to be started with python -m asyncio, otherwise you’d see SyntaxError: 'await' outside function:

# earlier versions of sdk had to be started with asyncio
python3 -m asyncio venv /path/to/user/venv
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