Duplicated UUID for multi-vehicle problem

Hi, I’m working on the first step to fly multiple quadcopters using Dronecore.
However, I found that dronecore assigns UUID using the version of autopilot.
Specifically, in the file ‘mavlink_system.cpp’,

void MAVLinkSystem::process_autopilot_version(const mavlink_message_t &message)
{
// Ignore if they don’t come from the autopilot component
if (message.compid != MAVLinkCommands::DEFAULT_COMPONENT_ID_AUTOPILOT) {
return;
}

mavlink_autopilot_version_t autopilot_version;
mavlink_msg_autopilot_version_decode(&message, &autopilot_version);

_supports_mission_int =
    ((autopilot_version.capabilities & MAV_PROTOCOL_CAPABILITY_MISSION_INT) ? true : false);

if (_uuid == 0 && autopilot_version.uid != 0) {

    // This is the best case. The system has a UUID and we were able to get it.
    **_uuid = autopilot_version.uid;**
} else if (_uuid == 0 && autopilot_version.uid == 0) {

    // This is not ideal because the system has no valid UUID.
    // In this case we use the mavlink system ID as the UUID.
    _uuid = _system_id;

} else if (_uuid != autopilot_version.uid) {
    // TODO: this is bad, we should raise a flag to invalidate system.
    LogErr() << "Error: UUID changed";
}


_uuid_initialized = true;
set_connected();

_autopilot_version_pending = false;
unregister_timeout_handler(_autopilot_version_timed_out_cookie);

}

Thus when I try to connect multiple drones on the system, dronecore assigns identical UUID because all my drones use identical PX4 version.
I also found that UUID is assigned by using the system id on the other parts(yeah, that’s what I expected), so I modify the source code, rebuild the library, and finally I succeed to assign unique UUID using system ID.

However, I wonder there were proper ways to assign UUID using system ID, rather modify the source code.
Is there are good ways to achieve my goal?
Please give teach to newcomer:joy:

Thanks for the question post. I will look into this next week and let you know.

There is an issue here:


I’ll try to bring this to the attention in the dev call next week.