Player 2.0: Toward a Practical Robot Programming Framework

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.