The company recently announced its community technology preview of its Robotics Studio development platform, which may be freely obtained from Microsoft.
The download of Microsoft’s Robotics Studio became available during the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition 2006 in Pittsburgh. The Studio will allow hobbyists and commercial developers to create robotic applications.
Fans of the Lego Mindstorms robotics toolset will also benefit from Microsoft’s newest developer platform. “In combination with Microsoft Robotics Studio, PC users will have a sophisticated tool that will further extend the powerful NXT hardware and software to an even wider range of developers who wish to create advanced applications for their Lego robots,” Sren Lund, director of Lego Mindstorms at the LEGO Group, said in a statement.
Developers will be able to use a variety of programming languages with the new platform. Microsoft of course noted how those in its Visual Studio and Visual Studio Express, like Visual C#, can be used to craft remote and autonomous execution scenarios.
(Am I the only one who reads the words “robots” and “execution scenarios” and gets a little bit concerned about the future? All of you robotic developers have read “I, Robot,” right?)
Microsoft said its Robotics Studio would be an end-to-end development platform. They have licensed the PhysX Engine from AGEIA, to enable “real-world physics simulations with robot models.”
Also, a lightweight services-oriented runtime provides greater flexibility in accessing a robot’s actuators and sensors. The message-based architecture of the runtime allows developers to use a web browser to check the state of those components.
High-level functions can be constructed with those simple components. Code modules can be reused in the development process, which would help speed up application development.
At the conference, Carnegie Mellon University representatives disclosed they would establish a Center for Innovative Robotics this year, and it will open in late 2006. Microsoft helped establish the center with funding and support from its Robotics Group.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
