Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio
Developer(s) Microsoft in association with the community
Initial release December 18, 2006 (2006-12-18)
Stable release 4.0 / March 8, 2012 (2012-03-08)
Operating system
Type Robotics suite
License Various
Website www.microsoft.com/robotics/

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (Microsoft RDS, MRDS) is a Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation. It is aimed at academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers and handles a wide variety of robot hardware. It requires the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.

RDS is based on CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime): a .NET-based concurrent library implementation for managing asynchronous parallel tasks. This technique involves using message-passing and a lightweight services-oriented runtime, DSS (Decentralized Software Services), which allows the orchestration of multiple services to achieve complex behaviors.

Features include: a visual programming tool, Microsoft Visual Programming Language for creating and debugging robot applications, web-based and windows-based interfaces, 3D simulation (including hardware acceleration), easy access to a robot's sensors and actuators. The primary programming language is C#.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio includes support for packages to add other services to the suite. Those currently available include Soccer Simulation and Sumo Competition by Microsoft, and a community-developed Maze Simulator, a program to create worlds with walls that can be explored by a virtual robot, and a set of services for OpenCV. Most of the additional packages are hosted on CodePlex (search for Robotics Studio). Course materials are also available.

Components

Example of a Reference Platform Robot

There are four main components in RDS:

CCR and DSS are also available separately for use in commercial applications that require a high level of concurrency and/or must be distributed across multiple nodes in a network. This package is called the CCR and DSS Toolkit.

Tools

MarsRoverSimulation

The tools that allow to develop an MRDS application contain a graphical environment (Microsoft Visual Programming Language : VPL) command line tools allow you to deal with Visual Studio projects (VS Express version is enough) in C#, and 3D simulation tools.

A simulated robot with a Kinect sensor

Notable applications

Critique

Versions and Licensing

Supported robots

An iRobot Create robot inside Microsoft Robotic Studio's Visual Simulation Environment
Robotino inside Microsoft Robotic Studio's Visual Simulation Environment

Microsoft Robotics and the Future

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio has not been updated or patched since version 4.0, which was released on March 8, 2012. On September 22, 2014, as part of Microsoft's restructuring plan, the Robotics division of Microsoft Research was suspended, according to a tweet from Ashley Feniello, a principal developer at Microsoft Robotics division of MSR (Microsoft Research). It is now highly unlikely that MRDS will ever be updated again, however forum members (MVPs) may still offer limited support.[6]

See also

References

Morgan, Sarah (2008). Programming Microsoft Robotics Studio. Microsoft Press. ISBN 0-7356-2432-1. 

Johns, Kyle; Taylor, Trevor (2008). Professional Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-470-14107-7. 

Kang, Shih-Chung; Chang, Wei-Tze; Gu, Kai-Yuan; Chi, Hung-Lin (2011). Robot Development Using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. Chapman and Hall/CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4398-2165-7. 

External links

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