Microsoft Robotics Blog

Hi all, My name is Loke, I’m the Sr. Product Manager here at the Robotics team in Microsoft. We are currently in the process of redesigning our website and one of the new areas we’re thinking of creating is a Showcase section where we’ll...

The Seattle Mini-Maker faire will be at the Seattle Center on June 2nd and 3rd over the weekend. If you're in town during that time, please drop by to see really cool projects made by hobbyists in the community. Our team will be there en-force to show...

The wait is finally over! We announced the winners of the Robotics @ Home competition at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 which was held on the weekend. The event was a huge success with over 100,000 people in attendance. All three winners spent two days...

The Robotics @ Home competition officially closed on April 30th and we now have the final submissions! Congratulations to the finalists who successfully completed the project. We are planning to unveil the results of the competition and announce the winners...

Today, we’re delighted to announce the general availability of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 (RDS 4) which can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft Robotics website . It was just over five months ago that we announced the availability...

Building a Pet Companion When my wife and I both worked fulltime, we had to leave our dog Darwin home alone for 7-8 hours every day, so I decided to build a pet companion to keep him company. Primarily, I wanted to build something that would entertain...

On November 15th Elliott posted a blog on the The Motion Tracking Robot Controller . I was fortunate enough to work on this project and host an interactive demo of it at Maker Faire 2011 in New York this last Fall. You can see what the installation looked...

A new release of Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta 2 is now available that is an update to the Beta released in September at Maker Faire in New York. This new Beta 2 version includes the following: Support for the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta 2 ...

    When presented with that question, most people don’t ask for clarification. They intuitively know what the question means, even children do. And then, after naming one or two examples that invariably include a robot tidying up a house...

The Kinect sensor is one of the best devices, for its price, to become available for robotics in the last decade. For $150 you get 3D range (distance) data and RGB color (webcam video) data. There is a microphone array thrown in as well. But wait! There...

The romote control has come along way from the first remote patent by Nikola Tesla in 1898 and the first wireless TV remote “The Flashmatic” that used photon cells as shown in the picture below. Fast forward 100 years and remote controls...

It’s estimated that 3.5 trillion photos have been taken since the first pinhole camera. Even if you account for population growth the progression of photography is mind boggling. Did you know that we take 4 times as many photos compared to 10 years...

The samples from the book "Professional Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio" have been updated to work with RDS 4 Beta and are available for download from CodePlex: http://promrds.codeplex.com There were very few changes required, but new users will...

In my July blog post, we announced the Kinect Services for Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) and I promised that we would have some exciting announcements this fall. It is my pleasure to announce the release of RDS 4 Beta available as a free of...

If you are in New York on the weekend of the 17th and 18th of September, come along to Maker Faire and chat with members of the Robotics Team who will be showing off a pre-release of the next version of Robotics Developer Studio. Microsoft Research will...

One of the Robotics Team developers, Emil Gustafsson, has turned his own learning experiences with the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) into a series of blog posts . His set of Tips and Tricks explains in detail how various aspects of CCR work...

A new book titled Robot Development Using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio has been released by CRC Press. (It is available from many booksellers including Amazon). This book provides a step-by-step introduction to using the Visual Programming Language...

Watch how the Lowell Team from the University of Massachusetts use Surface and RDS to build a very natural user interface for controlling robots for search and rescue. Read Stewart's blog post here for more detail : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msr_er/archive...

These are exciting times for Robotics. It is clear that the convergence of technologies and secular trends will make Robotics relevant to our day to day lives. The availability of Kinect and the work that the Robotics community has been doing the last...

This is a cool hexapod robot that's built using the Lego Mindstorm kit with logic written using the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio platform. Gokulnath Murugesan who hails from Chennai India put this together and recorded a video of it in action....

Microsoft together with their partner, Georgia Tech , developed a comprehensive course for teaching the basics of software engineering as it’s applied to robotics. This course utilizes the Microsoft Robotic Developer Studio R3 for software implementation...

Stacy Harris and John Mullinax were the key people behind the University of Michigan project to use RDS for social networking in cars. (See a previous blog entry ). In this short interview with John O'Donnell they talk about how the project came about...

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Robotics Lab have used a Microsoft Surface as a way to command multiple robots to move around in arbitrary paths. You can watch the video to see how smoothly it works. Visit the Robotics Lab web site...

The Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) Simulator is a key feature of the package that allows you to get started without buying expensive robots. It is a great tool for use in education. The add-ons outlined below help you to create your own simulation environments...

This partner update includes news from the RDS partners Studica and Robosoft. Studica News Studica is a new Robotics partner. They are the North American distributor for Fischertechnik and they are very active in the education community. Recently...