1. City College of New York 1 Player Stage Gazebo Rex Wong CCNY Robotic Lab A robotic research and development environment

2. City College of New York 2 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

3. City College of New York 3 Robot Programming Serial Canbus … Camera Laser Sonar Odometry Motors User Program Sensory Data Acquisition Motor Command Generation PCI USB Serial … Planner Desired Motion

4. City College of New York 4 Player: a device server Serial Canbus … Player Camera Laser Sonar Odometry Motors User Program Sensory Data Acquisition Motor Command Generation PCI USB Serial … Planner Desired Motion

5. City College of New York 5 Client / Server Model Player Server Device driver Interface Player Client Library C/C++ C# Java Tcl Python Ruby Lisp Octave SICK LMS 200 Pioneer SICK PLS Segway Khepera sicklms200 sickpls p2os segwayrmp khepera laser position Data Configuration Command TCP/IP IPC User Program

6. City College of New York 6 Hardware Abstraction Player Server Player Client Library C/C++ C# Java Tcl Python Ruby Lisp Octave User Program Robot Hardware Stage Simulator Gazebo Simulator Player Server Player Server

7. City College of New York 7 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.

8. City College of New York 8 Ubuntu GUI

9. City College of New York 9 Player/Stage Installation (1) First, download free copy from the following web site: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net

10. City College of New York 10 Player/Stage Installation (2) Go to “Download” hyperlink and click. It will bring you to the download sites as...

11. City College of New York 11 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)

12. City College of New York 12 Structure Tree after installation Root 2 copies of Player/Stage are stored separately in the following directory trees

13. City College of New York 13 GUI Home for Player-Stage

14. City College of New York 14 Console for running programs

15. City College of New York 15 Drivers of Player

16. City College of New York 16 Cfg files for Stage simulation

17. City College of New York 17 A peek of slam.cfg file

18. City College of New York 18 Run Player from console

19. City College of New York 19 A peek of world file

20. City College of New York 20 User’s C++ program

21. City College of New York 21 Visualization of a simulation

22. City College of New York 22 Built-in C++ Library

23. City College of New York 23 Built-in Utility

24. City College of New York 24 Playernav for path planning(1)

25. City College of New York 25 Playernav for path planning(2)

26. City College of New York 26 PlayerV: Robot’s Teleportation

27. City College of New York 27 Exploration and mapping(1)

28. City College of New York 28 Exploration and mapping(2)

29. City College of New York 29 Exploration and mapping(3)

30. City College of New York 30 Exploration and mapping(4)

31. City College of New York 31 Gazebo: 3D simulator

32. City College of New York 32 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.