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Microsoft's New Attempt To Dominate Robotics
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."
Wow, that is one biased summary.
If they combine it with a similarly good API as XNA is and get hardware support, that's great.
Coding robotics has previously required a lot of low level coding. Who of us haven't though how great it would be code your own robot easily, and make it work just like you want it to, without going to all the low level details?
Great, so where can I get a cheap compatible robot and what kind of stuff can I program it to do?
Also, http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/nasa-vision-workbench/ looks pretty damn cool.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sounds like a plan to me.
When the robot uprising starts, there'll be a million ways to crash the fuckers.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
In addition to creating a single RDS release, the robotics group is also making the source code of selected program samples and other modules available online, hoping to improve collaboration among users. In particular, Microsoft wants to entice the growing community of hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and weekend robot builders.
They are releasing code. Which is worth mentioning in the summary, since we are talking about Microsoft. Obviously they are not opening the whole thing, because after they extend, they want to make money, but still it is interesting.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
"Does Microsoft make anything that isn't slow, bloated, and fully integrated into skyne--I mean .NET?"
Notepad.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
They offer Internet Explorer for free undercutting Netscape's business model. They offer Outlook with a pretty user GUI and integrated with Office to push users to ask for Exchange. An email program that's easy to setup the first 50 users, but a nightmare for large corporations. Active Directory simplifies an all Windows environment, but mangles LDAP so you have to jump through hoops to add any other desktop to the environment. Sharepoint is really cool and easy to setup until you have to set controls and expand it enterprise wide. RDS is cool for simulating robotic programming and could be nice for education, but you'll end up with something that's easy to get started with, but a nightmare to really implement.
"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they start making (robotic) vacuum cleaners."
DUDE: Robot, grab me a beer.
iROBOT: I'm sorry, Steve says those are bad for you.
DUDE: What the fuck?
iROBOT: Would you like some water with a splash of lemon instead?
DUDE: No, I just want have a beer and play a little... where is my Halo 5?
iROBOT: There was a cutscene that showed a nipple, so it has been discarded. I have replaced it with "Yoga For Everyone." Would you like me to show you some poses? We can...
DUDE: No, please, go ahead and get started with out me. I'm just going to go find this receipt I've been looking for...
Robotics studio was made a paid product 2 years ago.
Looks like they did not get enough buyers and its being offered for free now!
And looks like it hasn't been updated in last few years.
Regarding CCR, .Net 4.0 has made vast improvements in multi-core API. .Net and ConCRT for C++
I don't see how much relevant CCR will be given the release of Task Parallel Library (TPL) for
Welcome our new, blue-screened robot overlords.
Didn't RTFA, but I'm assuming that the main idea here is lock-in to MS products and technologies. That means it'll be harder to share work and ideas down the road because of artificial dependencies on MS to run the code, etc. Hopefully folks in the field will hold their ground and build their work on top of open, sharable, neutral platforms
Long live the BSD license
By the summary's logic, Linus Torvalds must be the next Dr. Evil, because he's been giving away Linux for over a decade.
Honestly people, there are more than enough valid reasons to dislike MS without adding imaginary ones. TFS takes the free release of what's probably at least nifty and interesting software and turns it into an irrelevant blurb about "world domination". As far as I can tell, MS dominates two (closely related) industries: home/office desktop and laptop OSes and utilities, and office software. They have also entered into many other markets, sometimes producing good products, sometimes bad, but never really getting the necessary leverage to "dominate" other, often better competitors for long. (e.g. Xbox, Zune, hotmail, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, even IE at this point.) I'm sure there is no shortage of asshats who go with MS simply because of an easy contract, but I'd like to think that robotics engineers and researchers aren't among them. If the tools are solid, great. If not, no one will care.
Seriously. Hate on MS because of sleazy monopoly abuse. Hate on them for releasing disappointing public-beta style software. But the sort of hyperbolic nonsense on the frontpage makes *NIXers look like unbalanced zealots.
To be fair, it takes a lot of memory to store one level of undo.
mucking foron - did you see what microsoft did to its last attempt at putting out open source stuff? just killed it not too long ago. so... sure, yeah, whatever.
As with most religions, F/OSS zealots like what they like and hate what they hate without regard to fundamental principles.
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.
Where do they think there's money to be made? In toys, Lego Mindstorms pretty much has it sewn up; it's well established, integrates well into a major well established mechanical toy and and has a huge community around it. I don't know a great deal about industrial robotics, but I'd suspect it's a game for specialists simply because of liability issues - it's bloody dangerous if done wrong.
I want to to know what they're smoking. And where I can get some.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."