What's New in the Microsoft Robotics Studio September 2006 CTP?

  • Article

An Update from Tandy Trower, General Manager, Microsoft Robotics Group

Here were are in September and we've got another technical preview for you that includes some great additions.

New Robotics Hardware Supported

We've added support for:

 

  • Phidgets interface boards, sensors, and actuators
  • iRobot Roomba (using a BlueTooth interface)

Microsoft Visual Programming Language

To add to your programming choices of C#, VB.Net, Python, and Javascript we've added a new visual dataflow programming language. It makes the orchestration of services very simple.

Robotics Tutorial 2 VPL

Just drag and drop the services, and connect them up. You can even take a collection of connected services and expose them as a similar programming block. There are also 7 new tutorials to introduce you to its basic components and how to use them to program a robot.

New Tutorial for Using MSN Live Messenger to Control a Robot

Now remotely you can let your friends control your robot through a Live Messenger connection.

Robot Interface Using MSN Live Messenger

You can use this either to monitor the robot or put a camera on the robot to be your roving security bot.

Enhanced Support for Simulation

 

  • New tutorial that shows you how to create, color, and texture simple entities and build outdoor environments using publicly available survey data. It also shows you how to render simple robot out of basic physical shapes without the need for detailed meshes.
     
    An image from Simulation Tutorial 5
     
  • Support for the new Ageia 2.5 runtime, which includes support for the Ageia PhysX hardware accelerator.
  • Support for automatic generation of collision meshes from any mesh. Now you no longer need to do this yourself for your robots and entities.
  • Additional link for the simulated Kuka robotics arm.

Programming and Service Improvements

 

  • DssNewService now supports creation of VB.NET services. This makes it easier to create your own services using VB.
  • Ability to load multiple manifests.
    (This allowed us to simplify the number of manifests and allow them to be more easily shared between the tutorials).
  • Switch to BitConverter in our samples.
    (Thanks for the feedback!)
  • Virtual Earth mapping support for the Microsoft GPS service. Calling the GPS service with /map added to the URI will now produce a Virtual Earth street map of the current GPS supplied latitude and longitude with a push pin indicating the location.
  • New troubleshooting information for managing BlueTooth connected robots.

 

There's also a lot of cool stuff out there that people are doing. Check out the Channel 9 Sandbox. Someone posted a nice maze generator for the simulation tool. Check it out at the Channel 9 Site. Remember, if you want to share something you've done with Microsoft Robotics Studio, you should post a note in our newsgroup to let everyone know.

We still have more to include, but we wanted to get these new enhancements and features out to you.

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