1City College of New York

Player Stage Gazebo

Rex Wong

CCNY Robotic Lab

A robotic research and development environment

2City College of New York

What are the components?

• Player (installed on robots or remote computers)– Device server that provides a powerful, flexible

interface to a variety of sensors and actuators

• Stage (installed on remote computers only)– 2D, multi-robot simulator – Large number of robots or sensors

• Gazebo (installed on remote computers only)– 3D, dynamic, multi-robot simulator – few number of robots or sensors

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Robot Programming

SerialCanbus

…

Camera

Laser

Sonar

Odometry

Motors

User Program

SensoryData

Acquisition

MotorCommandGeneration

PCI

USB

Serial

…Planner

DesiredMotion

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Player: a device server

SerialCanbus

…

PlayerCamera

Laser

Sonar

Odometry

Motors

User Program

SensoryData

Acquisition

MotorCommandGeneration

PCI

USB

Serial

…Planner

DesiredMotion

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Client / Server Model

Player Server

Device driver Interface

PlayerClient

Library

C/C++C#JavaTcl

PythonRubyLisp

Octave

SICKLMS 200

Pioneer

SICKPLS

Segway

Khepera

sicklms200

sickpls

p2os

segwayrmp

khepera

laser

laser

position

position

position

Data

Configuration

Command

TCP/IP

IPC

UserProgra

m

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Hardware Abstraction

PlayerServer

PlayerClient

Library

C/C++C#JavaTcl

PythonRubyLisp

Octave

UserProgram

RobotHardware

StageSimulator

GazeboSimulator

PlayerServer

PlayerServer

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Pre-Installation Procedure

• Player/Stage works only in Linux Operating System.• Distributions: Red-hat, Fedora, Debian, SUSE... • Our choice: Ubuntu Linux --- user-friendly with GUI• Pre-installation: careful hard drive partition• Post-installation: add necessary software such as

C/C++ compiler (gnu C++/G++), devhelp, devhelp-common, dmsetup ...etc.

• Familiarize yourself with the directory tree of Ubuntu.• Use “Synaptic package manager” to find out what are

missing in order to run or compile programs.• Note: Linux OS is case-sensitive just as Unix system.• Must get used to work with console-based environment.

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Ubuntu GUI

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Player/Stage Installation (1)First, download free copy from the following web site:

http://playerstage.sourceforge.net

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Player/Stage Installation (2)• Go to “Download” hyperlink and click. It will

bring you to the download sites as ...

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• Download the latest version of Player, Stage, and Gazebo on the desktop of your Linux computer.

• Unzip the relative compressed files by double-clicking it.• All the unzipped files will go to their destined directories.

i.e., all Player files will go to /player-2.0.5/ directory and all Stage files will go to /stage-2.0.4/ directory

• Then, change directory to /player-2.0.5/ and type:./configure (it will take a while to compile Player)

• After complete compilation, type: make• If no error, then continue to type: make install• Sometimes, you need to type “sudo” to override the

requirement for administrative password.• Once this is done, repeat the same thing for Stage.• For some reason if you induce errors which prevents it from

complete, check the error messages to find out what needed to be done or what dependent file has been left out.

Player/Stage Installation (3)

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Structure Tree after installation

Root

2 copies of Player/Stage are stored separately in the following directory trees

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GUI Home for Player-Stage

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Console for running programs

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Drivers of Player

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Cfg files for Stage simulation

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A peek of slam.cfg file

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Run Player from console

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A peek of world file

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User’s C++ program

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Visualization of a simulation

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Built-in C++ Library

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Built-in Utility

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Playernav for path planning(1)

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Playernav for path planning(2)

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PlayerV: Robot’s Teleportation

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Exploration and mapping(1)

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Exploration and mapping(2)

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Exploration and mapping(3)

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Exploration and mapping(4)

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Gazebo: 3D simulator

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Conclusion

• Easy to use

• High fidelity to the existing hardware

• Easy to access hardware by driver interface and plug-in

• Easy to develop your own codes

• Many template to custom-make codes

• Porting codes from Stage to robot is effortless. Little modification needed.