The Player Project
The Player Project creates Free Software that enables research
in
robot and sensor systems. The Player robot server is a
widely used robot control interface in the world. Its simulation
backends, Stage and Gazebo, are also very widely used.
Player is a device server / networked interface that provides
a powerful, flexible interface to a variety of sensors and actuators
(e.g., robots). Because Player uses a TCP socket-based client/server
model, robot control programs can be written in any programming
language and can execute on any computer with network connectivity to
the robot.
Stage is a scaleable multiple robot simulator. It simulates a
population of mobile robots moving in and sensing a two-dimensional
bitmapped environment. When used as a Player plugin, Stage provides
virtual Player robots which interact with simulated rather than
physical devices. Stage can also be used as link library to create
custom simulations.
Features include:
- Robot platform independence across a wide variety of
hardware
- Support for a number of programming languages including C,
C++, Java, Tcl, and Python
- Flexible design
- Support for multiple devices on the same
interface. For
example the Pioneer 2 and RWI drivers both use Player's 'position'
interface to allow control of the robot's movement. Therefore the same
control code can control both kinds of robot
- On-the-fly server configuration
- Supports the following 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
Gazebo's features:
- Simulation of standard robot sensors, including sonar,
scanning laser range-finders, GPS and IMU, monocular and stereo cameras
- Models for commonly used robot types such as the
Pioneer2DX, Pioneer2AT and SegwayRMP
- Realistic simulation of rigid-body physics: robots can push
things around, pick things up, and generally interact with the world in
a plausible manner
- Player compatible: robots and sensors can be controlled
through standard Player interfaces
- Stand-alone operation: programs can interact directly with
the simulator (i.e., without going through Player) using libgazebo
(included in the distribution)
- Stereo camera model: generates stereo image
pairs, disparity and depth maps
- Re-written GUI using wxPython: most
devices can now be directly controlled/inspected through the simulator
GUI
- Plugin models: users can develop their own
robot/sensor models, and have these models loaded dynamically at run
time
- Skins: simple geometric models may be augmented
with realisitc 'skins' from 3D modelling programs
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Last Updated Saturday, April 13 2013 @ 04:38 PM EDT
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