Player 2.0: Toward a Practical Robot Programming Framework
by Collett, Toby H.J. and MacDonald, Bruce A. and Gerkey, Brian P.
in Proc. of the Australasian Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ACRA)
Address: Sydney, Australia Dec 2005.
Abstract
Player/Stage has become a de facto standard in the open source robotics
community. We describe recent work on restructuring the Player robot device
server into a system that more closely aligns with the idea of a robot
framework. The general requirements for a robot framework are also
discussed.
Player 2.0 is a major improvement in two basic areas, simplicity and
flexibility. The driver API has been vastly simplified with many more
parts of the communication being hidden from the user. The flexibility of
the new system is realised in the library division that allows for
different transport layers (or no transport at all), and in the new device
address structure that allows for inter-server device subscriptions.
