The Player Project
Free Software tools for robot and sensor applications
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It
News
[ Old news archive... ]
Purpose
The Player Project creates Free Software that enables
research in robot and sensor systems. The Player robot server is
probably the most widely used robot control interface in the
world. Its simulation backends, Stage and Gazebo, are also very widely
used.
Released under the GNU
General Public License, all code from the Player/Stage project is
free to use, distribute and modify. Player is developed by an international team of robotics
researchers and used at labs
around the world.
Software
Player
robot device
interface Player
provides a network interface to a variety of robot and sensor
hardware. Player's client/server model allows robot control programs to be
written in any programming language and to run on any computer with a
network connection to the robot. Player supports multiple concurrent
client connections to devices, creating new possibilities for distributed
and collaborative sensing and control.
Player supports a wide variety of mobile robots and accessories. Look
here for a list of
currently supported
components.
Stage multiple
robot
simulator Stage
simulates a
population of mobile robots moving in and sensing a two-dimensional
bitmapped environment. Various sensor models are provided, including
sonar, scanning laser rangefinder, pan-tilt-zoom camera with color
blob detection and odometry.
Stage devices present a standard Player interface so few or no
changes are required to move between simulation and hardware. Many
controllers designed in Stage have been demonstrated to work on real
robots.
Gazebo 3D multiple
robot simulator
Gazebo is a multi-robot
simulator for
outdoor environments. Like Stage, it is capable of simulating a
population of robots, sensors and objects, but does so in a
three-dimensional world. It generates both realistic sensor feedback
and physically plausible interactions between objects (it includes an
accurate simulation of rigid-body physics).
Gazebo presents a standard Player interface in addition to its own
native interface. Controllers written for the Stage simulator can generally
be used with Gazebo without modification (and vise-versa).
Player Project software runs on Linux,
Solaris, *BSD and Mac OSX (Darwin).
[ see also some older software here... ]
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