Microsoft Corp. today offered a sneak preview of a development platform for creating robot applications that leverages the company's foundation technologies to reduce development costs and create standards for unifying incompatible hardware and software.
Built around its Windows operating system and .NET application development tools, Microsoft Robotics Studio is said to be flexible enough to create applications for robots of all sizes, from simple consumer to complex industrial models. The development environment also includes simulation software, which is based on the PhysX engine from AGEIA and enables developers to simulate robotic applications using realistic 3D models. The simulation technology lets users design sophisticated robot applications without actually having the hardware, Microsoft pointed out.
At the RoboBusiness Conference & Exhibition in Pittsburgh, KUKA Robot Group and CoroWare Inc. demonstrated some of the applications that Microsoft Robotics Studio will enable. For example, KUKA controlled its lightweight robot prototype via a remote joystick using Microsoft Robotics Studio services, and CoroWare demonstrated Surveyor 3000, its mobile service robot, which can be remotely operated or programmed to run semi-autonomously.
KUKA, known for its industrial-strength robots -- used to bend sheet metal, for example -- is interested in expanding its footprint with Robotics Studio. "We see the possibilities for enabling completely new business scenarios in new market segments and for new products in our current markets," said Bernd Liepert, CEO of KUKA Robot Group, in a statement.
Microsoft has previewed its technology with a variety of robotics application developers, including ABB and RoboDynamics Corp. (developer of MILO, the robotic personal assistant), as well as universities including MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, which recently announced plans to create the Center for Robotics Innovation -- to be built with Microsoft funds.
"All of them are excited about what we are doing because it's a great architecture that provides ease of development for concurrency," said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group, in an interview. Robots generally have a lot of things happening at the same time, which makes programming and processing complicated.
"We created a lightweight library that makes programming for concurrency easy," Trower continued. The library does not assume all code is running on a single compute unit, he added, but rather, that it will be distributed among many units. "That is part of where we see the future direction of robotics -- the processing increasingly being distributed," Trower noted.
While having a programming model that takes advantage of many different processes going on that the same time will be beneficial, the real advantage of the Microsoft development platform is its familiar user interface.
Industrial robot vendors such as KUKA, ABB, and FANUC Robotics all have custom programs that allow the consumer of the device to write a robot application, such as the sequencing of commands executed to move a machine or the ability to open/close a gripper, for example.
"In the market there are companies that are essentially doing the same thing, but doing it differently," said a source at a major industrial robot company who requested anonymity. "We all have custom operating systems, custom languages, custom I/O drivers, and we all talk to the same equipment ... I think our friends at Microsoft have been standing back and saying, 'This is silly. If you use a common OS and a common framework, you'll spend more time writing applications rather than building platforms.'"
Having a consistent programming interface is something that automotive manufacturers -- the main consumers of industrial robots -- have been asking for, the source noted, but it takes a large company like Microsoft to initiate the change.
"We are providing the [robot] community a bootstrap to build itself on," Microsoft's Trower said. "This is not about Microsoft pushing Microsoft technology, but we are giving the industry something [it doesn't] have, which is a platform to bring pieces of software and hardware [together ... and allow [companies] to build on it themselves."
Robotics Studio is currently in beta but is available for download.