A message from the maintainers of the Player/Stage Project
Your friendly neighborhood Player PI's will be presenting a full-day tutorial on Player, Stage and Gazebo (P/S/G) at IROS'04 in Sendai, Japan, 29 September 2004.
The Player/Stage/Gazebo system (P/S/G) is a set of powerful, freely available, Open Source (GPL) tools for developing and experimenting with mobile robots and sensors: Player is a network server that provides a clean, abstract interface to a wide variety of robot hardware and software; Stage and Gazebo are simulators that provide populations of virtual Player devices.
P/S/G has a world-wide community of users, from undergraduates doing class projects in simulation, through graduate students using teams of robots, to multiple-institution DARPA-funded research teams using Player for systems integration. For many robot researchers, using P/S/G infrastructure will save significant development time; moreover, the Open Source nature of the project, and it's established user community, enables code re-use and replication of experiments in a way which has previously been very difficult.
If any of you have chosen or are thinking of choosing P/S/G as a platform for your research or teaching, this would be a great way to get up to speed. It's also an opportunity to learn about and influence the future development of the project, and to get to know the community that's been building up around this software.
Using Player effectively can save weeks or months on a robot project, and using common, free, GPL software can aid communication and collaboration between researchers.
From the website