Robot Software

One of the difficulties of doing research on robotic platforms is the lack of available software to accomplish basic functions like obstacle avoidance, mapping, vision, etc. For those software components that are available, they only work in limited circumstances on certain platforms. This situation makes the prospect of doing your own original robotics application an especially daunting task because you will have to re-write a lot of software to accomplish basic functions-- in effect, re-inventing the wheel.

The study of Robot Software Architectures seeks to alleviate the numerous problems encountered by novice robot programmers by providing easy and simple frameworks in which to test applications and re-utilize old software written by other groups for possibly different robot platforms.

MARIE is a project that seeks to unify and integrate all the various disparate software packages and testing suites. This would allow a person to rapidly develop and test software using tools that were not designed to work together.

Player is an abstracted device interface to various robotics research platforms. This allows you to run your programs on the real robot as well as on the two simulation environments, Stage and Gazebo.