Stage is a software that simulates a population of mobile robots, sensors and objects in a two-dimensional bitmapped environment. Stage is designed to support research into multi-agent autonomous systems, so it provides fairly simple, computationally cheap models of lots of devices rather than attempting to emulate any device with great fidelity. We have found this to be a useful approach.
libstageplugin
Stage is most commonly used a a Player plugin module, providing populations of virtual devices for Player. Users write robot controllers and sensor algorithms as 'clients' to the Player 'server'. Typically, clients cannot tell the difference between the real robot devices and their simulated Stage equivalents (unless they try very hard). We have found that Player clients developed using Stage will work with little or no modification with the real robots and vice versa. Thus Stage allows rapid prototyping of controllers destined for real robots. Stage also allows experiments with realistic robot devices you don't happen to have. Various sensors and actuators are provided, including sonar, scanning laser rangefinders, vision (color blob detection), odometry, and a differential steer robot base.
libstage
Stage can also be used as a C library to provide a robot simulation inside your own programs. This is useful if Player is not suitable for your needs, or if you want custom simulation models based on a well-known simulation engine.
The Player Project offers open source software tools for robot and sensor applications.
The Player Project creates Free Software that enables research in robot and sensor systems. The Player robot server is probably the most widely used robot control interface in the world. Its simulation backends, Stage and Gazebo, are also very widely used.
What's New in This Release:
This version incorporates a number of fixes made since the previous
major release:
Player plugin
· added unit test suite to verify functionality (build instructions in libstageplugin/test directory)
· many bug fixes
· blobfinder, fiducial, laser, position2d, simulation, sonar, and speech interfaces are now working correctly
CMake script fixes
· OpenGL headers located properly
· FLTK sourced correctly
· dependency failures should show up before compiling
· fixed bug where fiducial sensor would return duplicate results
· fixed some rendering glitches
· blobfinder now returns blobs in the correct horizontal order
· blobfinder sensor visualization displays in the plane of the screen
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