Microsoft plans Windows for robots

Robotics Studio programming tools will help users interact with robots via web or Windows front-ends

Microsoft plans a new hardware platform for Windows developers – robots.

At the RoboBusiness Conference in Pittsburgh this week, the software giant released a community technology preview (CTP) – or pre-release testing software - of Robotics Studio, a new set of tools aimed at business, academic and enthusiast developers working on robotics applications.

Robotics Studio’s visual programming tools include 3D modeling to create services that would let users interact with robots via web or Windows front-ends.

The firm also announced partnerships with leading robotics developers and with Carnegie Mellon, a US university that is recognised as one of the world’s leading robotics researchers. Microsoft plans to help fund a new centre that will open late this year at the institution.

The release could encourage a broader set of robotic applications as falling prices of processors, sensors and other components drive robotics innovation. Growing areas for robotics include toys, domestic vacuum cleaners and unmanned vehicles for rescue missions and inspections in fields such as mining and military applications. “[This release is] no bad thing but it's only one of a number of moves towards developing middleware for robotic applications,” said Jeremy Wyatt of the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science.

Wyatt added, “Evolution Robotics, for example, provides a fairly sophisticated platform for rapidly prototyping robot controllers. There is potential for a large market for autonomous robots but there are still huge R &D challenges to be overcome. A delivery robot would need to recognise a wide range of objects, but object recognition is incredibly hard in an everyday office environment. It will be tens of years at least before robots even begin to approach human levels of performance in such tasks.”

This is not the first time Microsoft has ventured into robotics. In late 2004, it beta-tested a kit called the .Net CPU module that combined sample hardware with Visual Studio.