How is Player different from other robot interfaces?
Previous work in the area of robot programming interfaces has focused primarily on providing a development environment that suits a particular control philosophy. While such tools are very useful, we believe that implementing them at such a low level imposes unnecessary restrictions on the programmer, who should have the choice to build any kind of control system while still enjoying device abstraction and encapsulation. Thus in Player we make a clear distinction between the programming interface and the control structure, opting for a maximally general programming interface, with the belief that users will develop their own tools for building control systems. Further, most robot interfaces confine the programmer to a single language, providing a (generally closed-source) language-specific library to which the user must link his programs. In contrast, the TCP socket abstraction of Player allows for the use of virtually any programming language. In this way, it is much more “minimal” th
