Microsoft Moves into Robotics

TechnologyReview.com ^ | September 02, 2006 | Daniel Turner

[annie laurie]

The software giant thinks it can make robotic engineering easier with a set of standards: its own of course

Microsoft believes the demand for consumer, research, and military robots will grow significantly--and it wants to own the market.

At the annual RoboBusiness conference this past June, the software giant released the first "community technical preview" of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS). Now, in its second preview version, MSRS is both a product and the lynchpin of a new educational push: the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

Founded by Microsoft Research, Georgia Tech, and Bryn Mawr College, the computer science and robotics program is aimed at college and graduate students. Together, the product and program are designed to bypass small, cheap robots, such as the Roomba (see "Hacking the Roomba"), in favor of a world of robots that are more complex and PC-like.

MSRS is a visual programming environment, similar to the LabView-based software provided with LEGO's Mindstorms NXT kit. It allows users to drag and drop box-like symbols for simple, low-level behaviors and services (such as accessing a sensor) and string them together to create complex robotic programs. MSRS also uses the AGEIA PhysX physics engine, which powers many PC games, to provide a visual simulation of the robot and its environment, complete with realistic friction, drag, gravity, and other factors.

Another feature of MSRS is that it provides a method for controlling robots over a network through a PC's Web browser. In addition to requiring Windows on the PC side, MSRS robots must use a CPU that supports Microsoft's .NET runtime, which could rule out the inexpensive and less power-hungry processors used in many robots today.

"We're trying to make it easier for people to write applications for robots," says Trandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft's Robotics Group. He says the current robotics community is too diverse, with many different hardware and software variants, to be efficient. "[MSRS is] like what Microsoft did with MS Basic," he says, "in smoothing out the fragmentation of PC hardware." Trower claims that MS Basic became a "de facto standard," which then allowed developers to write to one target and use a set of common tools.

"Robotics programming is very ad hoc," says Tucker Balch, associate professor of Georgia Tech's College of Computing and director of the IPRE. He notes that many students in robotics often have to spend much of their time recreating solutions that already exist to basic problems (such as how to program a wheeled robot to move in a straight line).

"Each robot is a one-off new development," says Balch. A large part of the work, he says, is making modules--software components that take input from sensors and deliver output other components can comprehend--work together. This low-level busy work can thwart his pedagogical goal: to teach 3,000 students about computer science at a high level; "so the robotics part has to be easy and robust," he says. Compounding the problem, various sensors and other robot components are made by different companies. "At present," Balch says, "we have to get source code and manually integrate the pieces."

[familyop]

LOL! Try the following. It's free, licensed for capitalism, more stable and much more secure. ...and no commie CEO or commie organization behind it.

http://www.netbsd.org/

[familyop]

"Microsoft Moves into Robotics"

Heh. All your home and business are belong to Micro$oft and China.

[EricT.]

Does every robot come with CTRL, ALT, DELETE buttons?

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Where does that are come from? A lot of freepers have been using it lately. Is it from some movie that most Americans should have watched?

[EricT.]

There is a major X-ray machine mfgr that has control panels that are either Win2k or Linux based. I managed to crash the Win2k panel...never had to figure out how to reboot the other one though.

[EricT.]

Microsoft claims it's NS5 OS does not have any spyware imbedded...

[familyop]

"Microsoft Offers Source Code to China"
(search--wiped from every news site)

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $8.8 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/women/12/11/health.women.gates.reut/

Bill Gates against repealing the inheritance tax
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_inheritance.html

"Gun-Control Group Changes Name, Keeps Agenda"
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=%5C%5CNation%5C%5Carchive%5C%5C200106%5C%5CNAT20010615a.html
(and Bill is a contributor)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/july-dec97/guns_11-4.html
(more money for gun control from Gates and his father)

"Is Bill Gates a closet liberal?"
http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/01/cov_29feature.html
(Bill Gates for gun control, pro-abortion, etc.)

http://vikingphoenix.com/news/madminute/1997/mm970040.htm
(Gates on gun control)

The Left-Wing Billionaire Collectivist Pigs
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/9/25/191020.shtml

Billionaire Collectivist Pigs on a Roll
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/10/11/171315.shtml

"Bill Gates Is No Free Market Hero"
http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2000/12/000046.html

[Paladin2]

The robot s should be programmed to open and close windows to let you know they are a about to either reboot or turn blue (yes I can still crash W2kPro and XP when trying to get stuff done).

[familyop]

IIRC, it came from one of the posters of the left. Many of them tend to use bad grammar/spelling.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

A lot of Americans in general have shoddy English (not to be hypocritical, though. Almost everybody has typos to some extent. This post could have some.) FR does seem to have people who use English more properly than most, though.

[EricT.]

Here's the full explanation of the "All your base" quote:

"All your base" wikipedia article

[familyop]

And people in another country tend to improperly use that instead of who more often (not to mention other more common errors there).

[familyop]

Thanks for the information, EricT. I didn't know that.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Much appreciated.

[Last Dakotan]

GE bought out Fanuc?

GE distributes Fanuc in the US. For this right GE had to agree to cease making it's own robotic and CNC controls.

Cincy Millicron / Vickers / Honewell used to have a PC-based controller that ran on WinNT...

You're talking about the Acramatic A-2100, the last controller Cincinnati Millicron made.

What is left of the great American icon, Cincinnati, now builds most of its machine tools in England using Fanuc controls.

Fanuc completely controls the worldwide market for this vital technology.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

I hope National Instruments' lawyers are reviewing this carefully. Their LabVIEW-based Mindstorms NXT platform is beyond awesome, and involves many patented technologies.

[Richard Kimball]

It originally came from an old video game, badly translated from Japanese. In the game, a character says, "All your base are belong to us." This is if you lose the game, I believe. It became a catch phrase on FR during the late ninties, early 2000's, much like "this is hugh", this is series", "a moose once bit my sister", and the ever popular Xenalyte concoction, "stune your beebers."

On the election night that the Republicans took over the senate (the pundits had been predicting a BIG Democrat win), someone hacked DU so that when you went to the DU site, a popup box came up that said, "All your senate are belong to us!". It is only suspected that it was a Freeper.

And that's the story of "All your ___ are belong to us."

[BlazingArizona]

Their LabVIEW-based Mindstorms NXT platform is beyond awesome, and involves many patented technologies.

LabView! I used to use that to do embedded 386 lab setups at the "Consulate of India" (Intel).

[glorgau]

The Blue Robot of Death?

[Xenalyte]

the ever popular Xenalyte concoction, "stune your beebers."

Oh, I only wish I could take credit for the beeber! That was al baby's creation, and a kick-ass thread it engendered!