Welcome to the Microsoft Robotics Studio

A Letter from Tandy Trower, General Manager, Microsoft Robotics Group

Robotics has long been a technology area that has captured the attention and expectations of many. We think robotics is poised to take off rapidly, and there are solid indications that this is true! With component hardware costs coming down and computational capabilities increasing, the robotics industry appears to have the right conditions to really grow quickly. Despite these optimistic factors, the key applications that will propel the industry are yet to be fully formed, though there are a number of good prospects already being explored. In large part the evolution of robot applications is held back by many factors, including the fragmentation of hardware, lack of portability of code, lack of good development tools, and lack of needed support libraries and algorithms. Just putting the basic foundation in place so applications can be written takes too much effort and requires too much expertise. Therefore, like the early PC industry, the robotics business is impaired the overhead required. Microsoft has created a new software development kit for the robotics community with the goal of supplying a software platform that can be used across a wide variety of hardware, applicable to a wide audience of users, and development of a wide variety of applications.

As a platform, our intent is also to enable a third parties to supply support for new hardware, technologies, and tools, just as Microsoft Windows provides a platform for others to bring their products and technologies to the community of PC users. So while we may populate our platform with some of our own contributions, those should not be considered exclusive to tools or libraries provided by other parties looking to provide interesting technologies for this platform.

To be more specific the Microsoft Robotics Studio delivers three areas of software:

1. A scalable, extensible runtime architecture that can span a wide variety of hardware and devices. The programming interface can be used to address robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors as well as 32-bit systems with multi-core processors and devices from simple touch sensors to laser distance finding devices.
2. A set of useful tools that make programming and debugging robot applications scenarios easier. These include a high quality visual simulation environment that uses for software physics supplied by the Ageia Technologies PhysX engine.
3. A set of useful technology libraries services samples to help developers get started with writing robot applications.

While our development environment runs on Windows XP (and will also support Windows Vista), it can be used to support not only robots that support Windows, but also robots that can operate as clients to a PC running Windows. We provide information that can be used by hardware or software vendors to make their products compatible with our development platform.

We are pleased to present our community technical preview (CTP). As a preview this represents an early release not yet intended for commercial use, however, it should enable you to try out and see what we are working on. Similarly, this CTP does not include all the components we hope to deliver, so there may be subsequent updates we provide. Also as a preview, some of what here may be subject to change before commercial release.

We welcome your feedback and suggestions, which you may sent to us at the Microsoft Robotics Studio Connect Feedback site.

Tandy Trower
General Manager, Microsoft Robotics Group
Microsoft Corporation

Tandy Trower has a 24 year history with new products and technology initiatives at Microsoft bringing to market new products as diverse as Microsoft Flight Simulator to Microsoft Windows. In addition, as a strong proponent of the importance of design in human-computer interaction he has contributed to the company’s investment in improving its user interfaces, founding the company’s first usability labs and product design roles. He continues to investigate and drive strategic new technology directions for the company and incubating new projects.

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