Microsoft Robotics Studio Blog

A selection of pictures …

JosephFernando — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:00:00 GMT

The following set of pictures was taken by my colleague Stewart Tansley at the Microsoft Booth - RoboBusiness Conference. These pictures show a number of our partners working with us at the booth, demonstrating robotic devices that run our software …

Okay I have installed the bits, what’s next?

JosephFernando — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:46:00 GMT

I suggest that you start with the tutorials to gain familiarity with the programming concepts and the runtime. There are three categories of tutorials installed with Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS)

Service Tutorial:

Step by step the reader is taken through service creation, modifying service state, persistence, subscriptions, and observing state through a web browser.

Note: the browser becomes a powerful debugging tool when you have the ability to observer a service’s state by merely directing the browser to a service instance. The service instance could be local or on a remote machine. This approach of using the browser becomes very useful when debugging complex and distributed robotic applications.

Robotics Tutorials:

In this collection of tutorials the read is taken through the process of developing an orchestration service to process sensory input and to control an actuator.

Simulation Tutorials:

The set of tutorials guides the reader through the process of using the Microsoft simulation environment.

Installed tutorials at a glance:

Service Tutorials

Tutorial 1 - Creating a service

Tutorial 2 - Updating state

Tutorial 3 - Persisting state

Tutorial 4 - Supporting subscriptions

Tutorial 5 - Subscribing

Tutorial 6 - Retrieving state and displaying it using an XML transform

Robotics Tutorials

Tutorial 1 - Accessing a service

Tutorial 2 - Coordinating services

Tutorial 3 - Using abstract reusable services

Tutorial 4 - Drive-by-wire

Tutorial 5 - Using advanced services

Simulation Tutorials

Tutorial 1 - Getting started

Tutorial 2 - Composing simulation entities with services

Tutorial 3 - Create a simulation using persisted state and a custom manifest

WSAP

JosephFernando — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:23:00 GMT

Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) uses a SOAP based protocol called WSAP. With WSAP an application is defined as a flexible composition of lightweight entities called services. Through operations defined by WSAP services can be created, manipulated, monitored, and destroyed repeatedly over the lifetime of an application.

WSAP defines a set of state-oriented message operations for retrieving, manipulating, and subscribing to structured state changes in a service. WSAP can be thought of as an extension to HTTP and is expected to be used as an addition to existing HTTP infrastructure.

For more information please see:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/9/3/0936d9a3-0d03-4174-97db-1c75d0ef44aa/WSAP.doc

Microsoft Robotics Studio Runtime

JosephFernando — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:00:00 GMT

A typical robot perceives it’s surrounding through an array sensors and interacts with its environment by orchestrating the reaction across one or many actuators. For a decent operation these activities must be performed simultaneously and possibly across multiple compute units. Though this may sound simple, concurrent processing of sensory input, making decisions and controlling the actions can get fairly complex very quickly when bound to classical threading and synchronization mechanisms.

Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) simplifies the orchestration and the distribution of computation by the introduction of service-oriented application architecture and a light weight runtime. This architecture facilitates the composition of structured applications through the assembly of software pieces – called services that provide device level abstraction, isolation, concurrency, distribution and failure tolerance. In this environment applications are a collection of services that orchestrates the interaction between these services by implementing the program logic.

To execute these concurrent and distributed applications the runtime offers the following:

A Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR):

CCR enables the coordination of messages without the use of threading, locks, semaphores, etc. The CCR is based on asynchronous message passing and provides an execution context for services including a set of high-level primitives for synchronizing messages.

Decentralized System Services (DSS):

DSS provides a service hosting environment and a set of basic services facilitating tasks such as debugging, logging, monitoring, security, discovery, and data persistence.

The interested reader is referred to the following technical article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/getstarted/runtime/default.aspx

Microsoft Announces Robotics Studio

JosephFernando — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 13:00:00 GMT

Today at RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition 2006, Microsoft Corp. showcased the community technology preview (CTP) of a Windows^®-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotic applications for a wide variety of computing platforms.

The community technology preview of the Microsoft Robotics Studio is available for download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics.

-Joseph Fernando

Microsoft participates in the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition as a gold sponsor.

JosephFernando — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 13:00:00 GMT

Microsoft participates in the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition as a gold sponsor. In addition, Microsoft will deliver a conference session outlining its perspective of the robotics market and will host a technical seminar for hobbyist, commercial and academic robotic developers. The RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition will be held at the Sheraton Station Square in Pittsburgh, PA on June 20-21, 2006. The event website is http://www.robobusiness2006.com.