Player / Stage / Gazebo

The Player/Stage/Gazebo project is a complete free-software middleware for robotic applications. It is hosted at Sourceforge. It consists of three main parts:

• Player: Control and monitoring software for real hardware. It interacts with robots, sensors, cameras, and other devices (documentation).
• Stage: A 2D simulator
• Gazebo: A 3D simulator

On the Innovation@CoTeSys seminar, we are mainly interested in Player.

We will use it to build flexible programs that interact with the Phidgets. The Phidgets driver was developed at our chair, and is available as a patch to Player. It deals with the low level details, and offers standardized Player interfaces, so that our software will later run on any other similar hardware that is also supported by Player. Player also handles the transmission of data through the network.

The newest versions of Player are only available through SVN. Use the following command:

svn co https://playerstage.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/playerstage/code/player/trunk player

If you follow the instructions on the sourceforge webpage, it downloads all branches.

If you use debian you need to install at least the following packages: libtool autoconf automake build-essentials libltdl3-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-signals-dev libgtk2.0-dev

For compiling the player version downloaded from cvs, in the source directory you need first to run ./bootstrap. Then ./configure, make and make install. You can use ./configure with the following options: –disable-alldrivers –enable-ptu46 –enable-rflex –enable-logfile –enable-linuxjoystick –prefix=/home/memeruiz/local/DIR/player-cvs –enable-xsensmt –disable-jplayer –enable-laserptzcloud

There are drivers of the phidgets for player but these are not in the upstream code yet. For getting this drivers please write to maldonad at cs.tum.edu or ruizf at cs.tum.edu.