Welcome to the Microsoft Robotics Studio (1.0)

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

We are pleased to release Microsoft Robotics Studio (1.0). Robotics has long been an area of technology 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 even 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 limited by the overhead required.

Microsoft has created a new software development kit for the robotics community which supplies a software platform that can enables development of a wide variety of applications which can be used across a wide variety of hardware, applicable to a wide audience of users.

As a platform, our intent is also to enable 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 in 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 create applications to drive robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors (from a connected PC) 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 resolution visual simulation environment that integrates software physics supplied by the Ageia Technologies PhysX engine.
   While Microsoft Robotics Studio can be used with programming languages such as those included in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio Express, also included is a new visual programming language that enables the creation of applications using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
3. A set of useful technology libraries services to help developers get started with writing robot applications, and tutorials which illustrate the basics of how to get started in a variety of programming languages.

While our development environment runs on Windows XP (and will also support Windows Vista), it can be used to support not only robots that run 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.

What's New Since Our November CTP Release

Security Support

Security is now fully implemented and turned on by default. It is fully functional for HTTP and TCP transports.

Simulation Scenario Editing

We have added an interface for editing entities and creating scenarios scenes (configurations) directly from the Visual Simulation Environment. Now you can easily select, reposition, rotate, or add entities.

More Documentation and Tutorials

We’ve revised and added more documentation. We've also added some new tutorials, including tutorial demonstrating a fully distributed application and a Visual Programming Language tutorial that demonstrates how to use it to program simulated robots.

Visual Programming Language Configuration of Services

You can now configure the services you use in VPL directly or by using another service. This is in addition to using manifests. VPL now enables you to compile your project and any related, user-defined activities as services. This means you can create your own add-on services for use with VPL or other programming languages. An option even enables you to generate a C# project.

Services Improvements

We improved a lot of our sample services and their XSLTs.

Licensing Information

For details about licensing, Click Here to access the licensing information.

Looking Forward

While I don't want to preannounce new features, 1.0 just the beginning. We've got lots of ideas for what we would like to add, but I also encourage you to look to what our supporting partners will be adding as well. We've posted information about a number of companies that will be incorporating our software into their products or offering add-ons.

Two years ago, when I presented my summary research, resulting from talking with many leaders in the robotics community to Bill Gates, Craig Mundie, and Rick Rashid, I was given the opportunity to assemble a group of some of Microsoft best development talent. After prototyping and review, it was agreed to take that work forward and create a new product which we publicly previewed for the first time in June 2006. Since that time, we have delivered monthly updates, culminating in this 1.0 release.

This project started as a direct response to encouragement from members of the robotics community to deliver something that would make creating robotics applications accessible to a wider audience; and to try to address some of the challenges in terms of good tools and transferability of skills and software across the diversity of hardware that's out there. And by doing so, we hope to nurture the creativity that will bring forth the technologies and applications that will drive this industry to the successful potential that industry analysts project.

Robots are an interesting technology. They spark our imagination--motivate our creativity. They are a magnet for attracting people's interests. It seems inevitable, given the directions in which PC technology is headed (driven by the passion and creativity out there), that robots will become a pervasive part of our digital lifestyles just as PCs have.

I want to thank all of you that have already taken the time not only to try it out, but also to provide us with your valuable feedback, and look forward to your continuing suggestions and ideas for how we can improve what we have. We had over 100,000 downloads of our Community Technical Previews. While we have now completed our first release, we still welcome your feedback and suggestions, which you can send 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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