Anilrgowda

At the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition 2006 in Pittsburgh this week, Microsoft announced it is shipping the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of its Windows-based robotics development platform. Dubbed Microsoft Robotics Studio, the package provides an "end-to-end robotics development platform," the company said in a prepared statement.
The package features a set of tools for programming and debugging robot applications scenarios, including a high-quality visual simulation environment that uses physics supplied by the Ageia Technologies PhysX engine.
Robotics Studio also includes a scalable, extensible runtime architecture that can support a wide variety of hardware and devices. The programming interface can be used to address robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors as well as 32-bit systems with multi-core processors and devices from simple touch sensors to laser distance-finding devices, according to Microsoft's statements.
It also comes with a lightweight services-oriented runtime. "Using a .NET-based concurrency library, it makes asynchronous application development simple...[including] accessing the state of a robot's sensors and actuators with a Web browser," the statements said.
Third parties can also extend the functionality of the platform by building additional libraries and services.
Both remote (PC-based) and autonomous (robot-based) execution scenarios can be developed using a selection of programming languages, including those in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Express languages. These include Visual C# and Visual Basic .NET, JScript and Microsoft IronPython 1.0 Beta 1, and third-party languages that conform to its services-based architecture, the company said.
It also provides a set of technology libraries services samples to help developers get started writing robot applications using Robotics Studio