IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2013 - 82
© ISTOCK
PHOTO.CO
M/MHELD
ENBERG
H
By Geoffrey Biggs,
Radu Bogdan Rusu,
Toby Collett, Brian Gerkey,
and Richard Vaughan
All the Robots
Merely Players
History of Player and Stage Software
W
hen robot researchers talk about robot
middle ware, inevitably Player will enter
the discussion. This piece of software
and its related tools have become one of
the most popular software tools in
robotics research. Its range of hardware support and the
flexibility it offers users, as well as its ease of use and
shallow learning curve, have ensured its success.
Over a decade ago, the Player robot middleware was
released to the world. What at first was just a small project to
ease the use of a laboratory robot became one of the world's
most popular robotics research tools, particularly outside of
industrial robotics. The middleware has been downloaded
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2012.2201593
Date of publication: 19 June 2013
82
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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE
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SEPTEMBER 2013
over 100,000 times, while the Stage simulator has over 70,000
downloads and the Gazebo simulator more than 35,000
(statistics obtained from the SourceForge download tracker).
The project as a whole still averages over 1,000 downloads
every month.
How did this small set of tools created by a few young
researchers rise to become such a commonly used piece
of software for developing both real and simulated
robots? In this article, we take a look at the history of
Player and Stage-where they came from and why. We
discuss why Player became and has remained popular
for so long while so many other robot software projects
have come and gone. We also discuss the Player project
as it stands today and where it may go in the future.
Throughout this article, we will refer to events that are
shown in Figure 1.
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