Microsoft Releases Robotics Developer Tools

By your command! Software giant Microsoft is releasing tools which lowly carbon units can use to maintain and service the needs of their robot overlords. Huzzah!

Sometimes Microsoft still has a surprise or two lurking in the dim warrens of its research labs! Today at the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition 2006 in Pittsburg, the Redmond software giant took the wraps off a technology preview of Microsoft Robotics Studio, a collection of tools and technologies developers, hobbyists, and others can use to create robotics applications using the Lego MindStorms NXT robotics toolkit.

Yeah, this is pretty dweeby stuff, but all the same, the world of amateur, hobbyist, and even pro-level robots has been hampered by a myriad of incompatible platforms and technologies. Lego’s been trying to solve that by opening up its technology as open source projects;now, Microsoft is getting into the game with the thing it does best: promulgating Windows to yet another platform. It’s just that this platform can twitch and move and wander around on its own.

“Microsoft, together with the upcoming Lego MindStorms NXT, will help further amplify the impact of robotics,” said Soren Lund, director of Lego MindStorms at the Lego Group. “The MindStorms robotics toolset has enjoyed a strong community of users since 1998, and the launch of our next-generation platform includes many built-in features that further the community’s ability to take MindStorms programming out of the box. In combination with Microsoft Robotics Studio, PC users will have a sophisticated tool that will further extend the powerful NXT hardware and software to an even wider range of developers who wish to create advanced applications for their LEGO robots.”

Microsoft Robotics Studio includes a visual programming tool for designing and debugging robotics applications, including tools to interact with robots using Web-based or Windows interfaces. Microsoft has also licensed the PhysX engine from Ageia to assist with realistic 3D modelling and real-world physics simulations. The toolkit also offers a lightweight runtime implemented as a .NET concurrency library, and the capability to extend functionality using Microsoft tools like Visual Basic, Visual C#, JScript, and Microsoft’s IronPython Beta 1.

So next time you’re watching Battlestar Galactica and you see a Cylon blue-screen