Player Project
Though Simbad will have good interfacing of sonars, lasers, etc, yRX DUH ERXNG WR fiNG UHVWULFWLRNV on geometrical shapes, and the lack of a modular structure to incorporate any type of robot. Voilà! Enter Player Project, http:// playerstage.sourceforge.net/. Elements of Player Project have been discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Player Project started off as a union of three software: Player (the server for controlling robots), Stage (2.5D simulations) and Gazebo (3D simulations). Later, both Stage and Gazebo were developed as standalones, and also incorporated into Robot Operating System (ROS). The great advantage that Player Project allows for is that the code used in simulation can also be used in real robots to provide for similar behaviour. Thus, Player Project assimilates the two interfaces of control and simulation, and nearly all current-day robotics platforms attempt to do so.
Other mentions, away from the open source realm, are Microsoft Robotics Developers Studio, http://www.microsoft.com/ robotics/ and Webots, http://www.cyberbotics.com/overview. Both are wonderful software, though not in the spirit of open source. which allowed for a common platform for software such as Stage, Gazebo, Urbi, support for Microsoft Kinect, support for ASUS Xtion, bindings into MORSE, etc.
2WKHU WKDN 526, HNWKXVLDVWV FDN fiNG WKHLU wDy WR D host of such open source robotics software platforms. An incomplete list would be: 1.Player Project— http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ 2.MORSE— http://www.openrobots.org/wiki/morse/ 3.Peekabot— http://www.peekabot.org/ 4.YARP— http://eris.liralab.it/yarp/ 5.MRPT— http://www.mrpt.org/ 6.Carmen— http://carmen.sourceforge.net/home.html 7.Simbad— http://simbad.sourceforge.net/ 8.Robocode— http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ 9.Rossum's Playhouse— http://rossum.sourceforge.net/ sim.html