A New Mechanism for Robots Control Based on Player/Stage

The player/stage is a promising software architecture used in multiple and distributed robots control researches. But the continuous TCP data stream communication mechanism which it uses, as other robot control systems do, brings heavy burden both to the overall network and its clients. The mechanism of publish/notification is introduced here to reduce the communication between the players and their clients. Through adding a server computer which connects to both the players and their clients, the clients register conditions of their interested data to the server and get notified from the server when the conditions are satisfied by data generated from the player. Not only can the communication between the Players and their clients be effectively reduced and the burden of the network be relieved, but also the clients are freed from continuous listening, receiving and processing the data stream from Players. Some experiments have been made and this mechanism is proved to be able to provide good performance for multiple and distributed robot controls based on player/stage.