Microsoft Lends a Hand to Robots
You might not know his name, but there’s a good chance that Tandy Trower will play a pivotal role in not one but two computing revolutions. The first was in November, 1983, when Trower was the product manager of a barely known piece of software called Windows 1.0.
Today, Trower is at the head of Microsoft’s newest release, Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.0, a platform to provide a common set of tools for programming nearly all the world’s robots.
First previewed in June, MRS is free to anyone who wants to put it to noncommercial use; companies with profits in mind have to pay $399 per license. MRS includes a runtime architecture that works on robots from the smallest personal models (such as iRobot’s Roomba or Lego Mindstorm’s NXT, also called the Tribot) to high-end commercial machines.
The application also includes a set of visual tools to program and debug robotic software. Last but not least, MRS sports a full-fledged 3D simulation environment, complete with a physics engine and laws of mass, gravity, and friction, so users can see the effects of their programs even if they can’t afford a nuts-and-bolts robot to try them on.
Hype, Hubris, or the Future?
If the excitement over MRS seems like more Microsoft hype, consider the fact that today’s robotics industry bears no small resemblance to the PC industry of the early 1980s, just before it began its boom.
“We started working on this product in late 2004,” Trower said in a statement. “One thing that got us started was the realization that the robotics industry looks quite a bit like the PC industry did 30 years ago.”
Back then, computing power was largely the province of huge companies with high-end mainframes, with some exposure at the college level and a small but devoted group of hobbyists who held the…
