Serialize state machines.

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Hello everyone,

I have a ROS node that receives SCXML files and converts them into state machines using the smach library. All the generated states machines are currently being stored in memory but only executed when required. Additionally the mentioned translation step takes some time to finish. I want to increase performance by serializing the state machines.

Since the code was written in Python ( rospy ), I tried doing this using the pickle library. However I got the following error :

pickle.dump(sm, open("sm.p", "wb" ))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 1376, in dump
    Pickler(file, protocol).dump(obj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 224, in dump
    self.save(obj)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 331, in save
    self.save_reduce(obj=obj, *rv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 425, in save_reduce
    save(state)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 286, in save
    f(self, obj) # Call unbound method with explicit self
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 655, in save_dict
    self._batch_setitems(obj.iteritems())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 669, in _batch_setitems
    save(v)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/pickle.py", line 306, in save
    rv = reduce(self.proto)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/copy_reg.py", line 70, in _reduce_ex
    raise TypeError, "can't pickle %s objects" % base.__name__
**TypeError: can't pickle lock objects**

From my understanding of the error ( I'm a beginner ) I tried to manually change the smach library code by overwriting the defaut _ _getstate_ _ and _ _setstate_ _ methods to delete/release locks before serialization, as shown:

# example of used __getstate__
def __getstate__(self):

    if self._locks.locked() :
        self._locks.release()
    return self.__dict__

# example of used __setstate__
def __setstate__(self, d):

    if not self._locks.locked() :
        self._locks.acquire()
    self.__dict__.update(d)

I still got the same error. I'm running ROS Kinetic under Ubuntu 16.04 ( 64-bit - Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz × 8 ).

Is there is a solution/workaround for this problem? Many thanks in advance.

Pedro Pereira