Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft's New Attempt To Dominate Robotics

Posted by timothy on from the more-robots-in-more-places dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Microsoft's Robotics Group is announcing new world domination plans — at least for the robotics world. The company is making its Robotics Developer Studio (RDS), which includes Microsoft's CCR and DSS runtime toolkit, available to anyone for free. Why make it a freebie? Because the company wants to expand its RDS base and get a grip on the robotics development space, hoping big things will come out of it."

1 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. It's more like abandonware by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This looks more like Microsoft giving up than going for world domination. A few years ago, Microsoft had a presence at robotics conventions, pushing the thing. That shrank, then disappeared.

    A basic problem is that Microsoft Robotics Studio is built on Microsoft Web Services, which is not exactly the tool you want for real-time operation. It has a simple-minded visual programming environment. There's little (any?) vision support. There's little, if any, machine learning. It's really only about two notches above Lego Mindstorms, and way below stuff like DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles or Boston Dynamics' robots.

    If you want to see more cutting edge stuff, download Willow Robotics code. They're working hard on vision and making real progress.

    Hobbyist robotics needs a major quality upgrade. People are still building '80s type robots. By now, any serious robot should have a vision system and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Any robot with a laptop, or one of the fancier cell phones, on board has enough compute power for that. But Microsoft Robotics Studio won't take you there.