| Player, Stage, Gazebo |
| Wednesday, 20 August 2008 21:16 |
 The Player is a popular open source TCP/IP-based hardware abstraction layer for a growing number of robotic hardware modules. The Stage and Gazebo provide accompanying simulation environments. The environments support multi-robot simulations suitable for research in swarm- or team-working of robots.
 Player, Stage and Gazebo
Running on a robot, Player provides a simple interface to the robot's sensors and actuators over the IP network. Data can be read from the sensors, and written to actuators, for on-the-fly configuration. A number of open source software modules have been developed for Player, including computer vision and navigation/mapping modules.
It generates both realistic sensor feedback and physically plausible interactions between objects (it includes an accurate simulation of rigid-body physics).
Stage simulates a population of mobile robots, sensors and objects in a two-dimensional bitmapped environment. Stage is designed to support research into multi-agent autonomous systems, so it provides fairly simple, computationally cheap models of lots of devices rather than attempting to emulate any device with great fidelity. We have found this to be a useful approach.
By Michael Somby (
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