Interfaces, drivers, and devices

Fundamental concepts in Player. More...

Fundamental concepts in Player.

There are 3 key concepts in Player:

An example

Consider the laser interface. This interface defines a format in which a planar range-sensor can return range readings (basically a list of ranges, with some meta-data). The laser interface is just that: an interface. You can't do anything with it.

Now consider the sicklms200 driver. This driver controls a SICK LMS200, which is particular planar range sensor that is popular in mobile robot applications. The sicklms200 driver knows how to communicate with the SICK LMS200 over a serial line and retrieve range data from it. But you don't want to access the range data in some SICK-specific format. So the driver also knows how to translate the retrieved data to make it conform to the format defined by the laser interface.

The sicklms200 driver can be bound to the laser interface (see Writing configuration files for how to do this in a configuration file) to create a device, which might have the following address:

localhost:6665:laser:0

The fields in this address correspond to the entries in the player_devaddr_t structure: host, robot, interface, and index. The host and robot fields (localhost and 6665) indicate where the device is located. The interface field indicates which interface the device supports, and thus how it can be used. Because you might have more than one laser, the index field allows you to pick among the devices that support the given interface and are located on the given host:robot Other lasers on the same host:robot would be assigned different indexes.

Writing portable robot code

Other drivers also support the laser interface, including driver_urglaser and stage. From the point of view of programs that use these drivers, they're all the same: they supply planar range data. It doesn't matter exactly which model of laser is being used, or even whether the laser is physical or simulated. It is possible to write programs that are portable across different kinds of lasers, both physical and simulated. For example playerv can visualize range data from any laser. Such portability is major benefit of defining standard interfaces.