Microsoft's New Attempt To Dominate Robotics 225
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Microsoft's Robotics Group is announcing new world domination plans — at least for the robotics world. The company is making its Robotics Developer Studio (RDS), which includes Microsoft's CCR and DSS runtime toolkit, available to anyone for free. Why make it a freebie? Because the company wants to expand its RDS base and get a grip on the robotics development space, hoping big things will come out of it."
API! (Score:3, Interesting)
If they combine it with a similarly good API as XNA is and get hardware support, that's great.
Coding robotics has previously required a lot of low level coding. Who of us haven't though how great it would be code your own robot easily, and make it work just like you want it to, without going to all the low level details?
Where can I get a robot? (Score:4, Interesting)
Great, so where can I get a cheap compatible robot and what kind of stuff can I program it to do?
Also, http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/nasa-vision-workbench/ [nasa.gov] looks pretty damn cool.
Only 30,000 years to Galaxia. (Score:1, Interesting)
Let's hope.
Re:Summary is Ridiculous Bullshit. (Score:1, Interesting)
Ah, I see. I thought you were emphasizing MS forcing these tools into acceptance rather than their inherent crappiness. But then again, the very reason I'm not against MS getting into other markets is because they can't get away with that; they're forced to compete like everyone else, and occasionally they manage to make something pretty darn cool. The OLED screen & tegra chipset on latest Zune, for example, or the (accidentally) highly moddable 1st gen Xbox.
Re:Not only free as in beer! (Score:3, Interesting)
making the source code of selected program samples and other modules available online
Woohoo, they're providing tutorial code.
It's more like abandonware (Score:5, Interesting)
This looks more like Microsoft giving up than going for world domination. A few years ago, Microsoft had a presence at robotics conventions, pushing the thing. That shrank, then disappeared.
A basic problem is that Microsoft Robotics Studio is built on Microsoft Web Services, which is not exactly the tool you want for real-time operation. It has a simple-minded visual programming environment. There's little (any?) vision support. There's little, if any, machine learning. It's really only about two notches above Lego Mindstorms, and way below stuff like DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles or Boston Dynamics' robots.
If you want to see more cutting edge stuff, download Willow Robotics code. They're working hard on vision and making real progress.
Hobbyist robotics needs a major quality upgrade. People are still building '80s type robots. By now, any serious robot should have a vision system and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Any robot with a laptop, or one of the fancier cell phones, on board has enough compute power for that. But Microsoft Robotics Studio won't take you there.
I'd like some of whatever they're smoking. (Score:3, Interesting)
Where do they think there's money to be made? In toys, Lego Mindstorms pretty much has it sewn up; it's well established, integrates well into a major well established mechanical toy and and has a huge community around it. I don't know a great deal about industrial robotics, but I'd suspect it's a game for specialists simply because of liability issues - it's bloody dangerous if done wrong.
I want to to know what they're smoking. And where I can get some.
Re:Summary is Ridiculous Bullshit. (Score:1, Interesting)
While I agree to some extend, I can't see what you don't like about the .net API. It's one of the finest APIs I've ever used.