Danger, Will Robinson! - What is happening at Microsoft with Robotics?

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Growing up it was easy to believe that by now robots would be doing all the tasks around the house that are dull and boring such as cleaning for floors or washing the dishes. While we got some way to this goal with the launch of the iRobot Roomba there is still a long way to go before we see anything like C-3PO and R2D2 greeting us in the morning with a coffee and today's copy of USA Today.

In fact a paper published in Scientific American has Bill Gates saying that there is a hot field coming and that is robotics. Therefore Microsoft has committed resources to work in the field of robotics and has a group headed by Tandy Trower to work in this space and see what Microsoft can do to expand this new field and see how some of the lessons learned in the area of personal computing could also work in robotics. The story is very similar, in the old days of computing every vendor had their own standards for how a computer should work and how a user should interact with it. With the PC revolution we started moving to a standardized platform. The same is true in the field of robotics today with many companies producing many robots which will not talk to other companies robots.

In Japan, robots are seen as the answer to an aging population so you will have probably seen many robots from japanese companies such as Sony, Honda and Toyota. 

As your probably guessing at this point we have a story to tell here and that is Microsoft Robotics Studio This set of tools lets you build your robotic code using a .NET language and run it in a simulated environment. Let's imagine you are a company who sells a robot for building cars. Do you really want to test your code on this platform and see the real hardware crash into a wall due to a software bug? No, instead you can build a simulation inside of the Microsoft Robotics studio environment and work out the bugs before going to production. The Microsoft Robotics Studio comes with a number of simulated robots and you can add your own. In addition you can start of with a simulated Lego Mindstorm robot and then move onto large robots as your skills increase. Also as part of this simulation you can also use an existing simulation such as building or location or again create your own.

Of course the ability to use Lego with Microsoft Robotics Studio means your children could be knocking on your door to play with your new simulated robot. As well as having commercial applications robotics is a great way to get children interested in computers and programming both using a .NET language as well as programming visually using VPL or Visual Programming Language 

In addition to this set of tools we also launched a competition called RoboChamps This competition consists of a number of challenges and started of with a challenge to program a robot to find its way through a maze using its various sensors. The second competition was to program a Sumo robot to push its opponent out of the ring. The next challange though is interesting not only because of what you have to do but also because the top prize is a real car from Kia Motors!  In this challenge called Urban your robotic vehicle has to navigate around a town and go from point to point. Of course it has onboard camera, gps and laser range finder but will this be enough when you are faced with trying to write code to cope with other cars, traffic lights and so on. Either way though its a lot cheaper than trying this using real robotic cars. Future challenges at RoboChamps will also include a Mars Rover mission. As you can see from these challenges the Microsoft Robotics platform has opened the door for everyone from the hobbyist to professional to get involved in the robotics revolution.

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Have fun!

John O'Donnell
Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
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