The Player Project (formerly the Player/Stage Project) is a project to create

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

for research into

robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist human ...

and sensor systems. Its components include the ''Player'' network server and the ''Stage'' robot platform simulators. Although accurate statistics are hard to obtain, Player is one of the most popular open-source robot interfaces in research and post-secondary education. Most of the major intelligent robotics journals and conferences regularly publish papers featuring real and simulated robot experiments using Player and Stage.

Overview

The Player Project is an umbrella under which two robotics-related software projects are currently developed. These include the Player networked robotics server, and the Stage 2D robot simulation environment. The project was founded in 2000 by Brian Gerkey, Richard Vaughan and Andrew Howard at the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8. ...

at Los Angeles, and is widely used in robotics

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and

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. It releases its software under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

with documentation under the

GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the r ...

. The Player is set of APIs (e.g. position2d, bumper, ir, speech, power) that can be implemented by a robot chassis (Roomba, Khephera etc.), possibly over serial line or network, or by Stage (2D simulator) or Gazebo (3D simulator).

Player

The Player software runs on Microsoft Windows and

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-compatible

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, including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

, Solaris, and the BSD variants. Player can be described as a 'robot abstraction layer,' in that all devices are abstracted into a set of pre-defined interfaces. Player supports a wide variety of hardware (sensor devices and robot platforms alike). It also contains client library support for a number of programming languages including C, C++, Python and

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum (aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapp ...

. Third-party client libraries are available in languages like

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

and Tcl. Additional features include a minimal and flexible design, support for interfacing with multiple devices concurrently, and on-the-fly server configuration.

Stage

The Stage simulator is a 2D multiple-robot simulation environment built on top of FLTK. Stage provides a basic simulation environment that can be scaled to model one to hundreds of robots at a time. Stage can be used alone to simulate robot behaviors via user-defined control programs. Stage can also interface with Player, allowing users of the Player to access simulated sensors and devices through the Player interfaces.

Gazebo

The Gazebo 3D robot simulator was a component in the Player Project from 2004 through 2011. Gazebo integrated the ODE physics engine, OpenGL rendering, and support code for sensor simulation and actuator control. In 2011, Gazebo became an independent project support by Willow Garage.
- Gazebo Simulator

Supported robots

* Acroname's Garcia * Botrics's Obot d100 * CoroWare Inc. Corobot and Explorer * Evolution Robotics' ER1 and ERSDK robots * iRobot's Roomba vacuuming robot * K-Team's Robotics Extension Board (REB) attached to Kameleon 376BC * K-Team's Khephera * MobileRobots' (formerly ActivMedia) PSOS/P2OS/AROS-based robots * Nomadics' NOMAD200 (and possibly related) mobile robots * RWI/iRobot's RFLEX-based robots (e.g., B21r, ATRV Jr) * Segway's Robotic Mobility Platform (RMP) * UPenn GRASP's Clodbuster * Videre Design's ERRATIC mobile robot platform * White Box Robotics' 914 PC-BOT

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://playerstage.sourceforge.net
Player Project wiki

Gazebo Simulator
Free software projects Robotics simulation software 2000 software 2000 in robotics