Reusable robot software and the player/stage project

The authors of several well-known robot software systems met at the ICRA 2005 workshop on the Principle and Practice of Software Development in Robotics. The meeting was held to examine the role of software engineering concepts and methods in experimental robotics applications. Everyone at the workshop agreed that extensive reuse of robot software should help to make robot development faster, easier and more efficient, and that this was highly desirable. There exist many robot programming tools and frameworks designed to promote this idea, some of which have been actively developed for several years using very fine software engineering techniques. However, very few supposedly reusable systems are extensively used outside their home institution or their immediate collaborators. Many well-engineered systems are never used at all. This suggests that there is more to getting code widely reused than nice code design, however principled. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.