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.
Key Features
- 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 realistic ‘skins’ from 3D modelling programs.
Website: playerstage.sourceforge.net, rtv.github.io/Stage
Support: Documentation, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Brian Gerkey, Richard Vaughan, Andrew Howard, and Nathan Koenig
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Stage is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Robotics Software | |
|---|---|
| NASA Vision Workbench | Image processing in the context of machine vision |
| DART | Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit |
| Gazebo Sim | Robot simulation made easy |
| AprilTag | Visual fiducial system popular for robotics research |
| Webots | Multi-platform desktop application used to simulate robots |
| ROS | Software framework for building robot applications |
| ARGoS | Physics-based simulator designed to simulate robot swarms |
| MoveIt | Robotic manipulation platform for ROS 2 |
| OpenRTM-aist | Component-oriented development of robot systems |
| The Player Project | Cross-platform robot device interface & server |
| Urbi | Universal Robot Body Interface |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |