Extending Player/Stage/Gazebo towards Cognitive Robots Acting in Ubiquitous Sensor-equipped Environments

Standardized middleware for autonomous robot control has proven itself to enable faster deployment of robots, to make robot control code more interchangeable, and experiments easier to replicate. Unfortunately, the support provided by current middleware is in most cases limited to what current robots do: navigation. However, as we tackle more ambitious service robot applications, more comprehensive middleware support is needed. We increasingly need the middleware to support ubiquitous sensing infrastructures, robot manipulation tasks, and cognitive capabilities. In this paper we describe and discuss current extensions of the Player/Stage/Gazebo (P/S/G) middleware, one of the most widespread used robot middlewares, of which we are active developers, that satisfy these requirements.