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changes. However, it continues to be supported by its current maintainer, Rich Mattes, with regular bug ﬁxes and
enhancements to drivers and interfaces. New features are
still added; in one recent example, a complete scripting
interface was added to the server.
Although several new middleware projects have appeared
that follow a much more distributed component model,
Player is still capable of providing the same concepts. Drivers
can be treated as components, and Player servers provide the
communications middleware and deployment control.
While it may seem that Player's popularity is waning, it still
ﬁlls an important niche in robot software and is still a popular
piece of software. Player 3, released in September 2009, has
over 15,000 downloads as of mid-2011. A recent survey by
Robotics Business Review showed that Player is still one of the
most popular tools in robotics and is likely to continue to be
so for some years [21]. The mailing list remains active, regularly receiving mail from new users requesting assistance.
Player's future most likely lies in education. Its simple programming model is well suited to beginner and young programmers working with simple robots. Encouraging an
interest is important to programming education, and if
LEGO Mindstorms [22] has shown us anything, it is that
robots make programming interesting.
Conclusions
The ﬁrst paper published about Player ended with the following statement:
The acid test of Player will be its uptake. We hope that
Player will develop over the next few years into a wellused tool. It will not suit every application, but it has
proved useful in a variety of roles in our labs. [4]
We believe that Player has undoubtedly passed this acid test.
From humble beginnings as an attempt to make a lab's
robots more usable, Player has grown to become the one
of the most popular robot software systems outside of
industrial robots. Player solved a problem in robot software that no other architecture of the time did.
Player's success can be attributed to its ﬂexibility,
which gave researchers the freedom they needed; its ease
of use, allowing even beginner programmers to use it; the
Stage simulator; and most importantly, its community
support. The project is still a popular tool in robotics
research today.
References

[1] B. B. Werger, "Ayllu: Distributed port-arbitrated behavior-based control,"
in Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems, vol. 4, L. E. Parker, G. Bekey, and
J. Barhen, Eds. Knoxville, TN: Springer-Verlag, Oct. 2000, pp. 25-34.
[2] R. Brooks, "A robust layered control system for a mobile robot," IEEE J.
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Intell. Syst., School Eng., Univ. Southern California, Los Angeles, Tech. Rep.
IRIS-00-392, Nov. 2000.
[4] B. P. Gerkey, R. T. Vaughan, K. Stoy, A. Howard, G. S. Sukhatme, and M. J.
Mataric, "Most valuable player: A robot device server for distributed control," in
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[5] K. Konolige, COLBERT: A Language for Reactive Control in Sapphira (Lecture Notes Artificial Intelligence), vol. 1303. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997,
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[21] Tools, Standards, and Platforms for Commercial Robotics Development:
An Adoption Profile. (2010) [Online]. Available: http://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/articles/newsletter view/tools-standards-and-platforms-for-commercial-robotics-development-an-adopti/
[22] MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 2.0. (2006) [Online]. Available: http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/products/ris/index.Asp
[23] R. B. Rusu, B. Gerkey, and M. Beetz, "Robots in the kitchen: Exploiting
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pp. 844-856, 2008.

Geoffrey Biggs, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. E-mail:
gbiggs@ieee.org.
Radu Bogdan Rusu, Open Perception, California. E-mail:
rusu@openperception.org.
Toby Collett, Auckland, New Zealand. E-mail: robotics@plan9.
net.nz.
Brian Gerkey, Open Source Robotics Foundation, Mountain
View, California. E-mail: gerkey@osrfoundation.org.
Richard Vaughan, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.
E-mail: vaughan@sfu.ca.
http://www.roboticsbusiness http://www.review.com/articles/newsletter http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/products/ris/index.Asp http://www.net.nz
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2013
