Interfaces, drivers, and devices
[Tutorials]
Collaboration diagram for Interfaces, drivers, and devices:
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- interface : A specification of how to interact with a certain class of robotic sensor, actuator, or algorithm. The interface defines the syntax and semantics of all messages that can be exchanged with entities in the same class.
- driver : A piece of software (usually written in C++) that talks to a robotic sensor, actuator, or algorithm, and translates its inputs and outputs to conform to one or more interfaces. The driver's job is hide the specifics of any given entity by making it appear to be the same as any other entity in its class.
- device : A driver bound to an interface, and given a fully-qualified address. All messaging in Player occurs among devices, via interfaces. The drivers, while doing most of the work, are never accessed directly.
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 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.