Player Project

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Player Project
A Pioneer 3-AT robot in the Gazebo 3D simulation environment.
Developed by	Brian Gerkey, Richard Vaughan and Andrew Howard
Latest release	Player 2.05 / December 13, 2007
OS	Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X
Genre	Robotics suite
License	GNU General Public License
Website	Official Webpage

The Player Project (formerly the Player/Stage Project or Player/Stage/Gazebo Project) is a project to create free software for research into robotics and sensor systems. Its components include the Player network server and Stage and Gazebo robot platform simulators. Although accurate statistics are hard to obtain, Player is probably the most-used robot interface in research and post-secondary education. Most of the major intelligent robotics journals and conferences regularly publish papers featuring real and simulated robot experiments using Player, Stage and Gazebo.

These run on POSIX-compatible operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and the BSD variants; a port to Microsoft Windows is planned. The project was founded in 2000 by Brian Gerkey, Richard Vaughan and Andrew Howard and is widely used in robotics research and education.^[1] It releases its software under the GNU General Public License with documentation under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Features include: robot platform independence across a wide variety of hardware,^[2] support for a number of programming languages including C, C++, Java, Tcl, and Python, a minimal and flexible design, support for multiple devices on the same interface, and on-the-fly server configuration.

Microsoft Robotics Studio, released in 2007, offers many similar functions, but is Windows-only, and has different licensing conditions.

URBI, released in 2003, also offers similar functions. It is cross-platform and interfaced with Player. Licensing is a dual GPL/proprietary approach.