How May I Serve You Today?
Submitted by michael on Fri, 2006-12-29 01:11.
It's a well known fact that Microsoft's early years were focused by the mantra "a computer in every home." A year ago Bill Gates reported that they were only about fifteen percent of the way towards their lofty goal, I'm sure due in some part to the distractions they have had along their way. In recent years, the computing landscape has been changing quite rapidly.
Mobile technologies are poised to take over the world. The computers inside our cells phones are many times more powerful and capable than the ones that Bill Gates and Paul Allen worked on when they first started Microsoft. Today, computers running Microsoft software are found in many more places than the desktop at home or in the office. Microsoft has moved from the desktop, to the laptop, into the palm of your hand in the form of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cell phones, and even into automobiles (putting new meaning to the term mobile computing). Microsoft Windows software is everywhere.
With a press release early this December, Microsoft announced their latest effort to gain a foothold in yet another new area... robotics. A Q&A session with Tandy Trower reveals that Microsoft views the current state of affairs with robotics technology to be in a similar place in time as the PC industry was when Microsoft began. There are big companies with lots of money to spend doing amazing things with big robots that take lots of power to run. These companies use robots to build cars and move containers around a shipping yard. On the other hand, there are hobbyists and small companies building robots on a smaller scale. There are a lot of different "platforms" for designing, programming and running the new breed of in-house robots.
Microsoft is hoping to provide some consistency in how people experiment and work with robotics. They have partnered with many hobby robotics and kit manufacturers such has the Lego Group, iRobot (the makers of the Roomba robotic vacuum), fishertechnik and others. There are also many other manufacturers that plan to support Microsoft's new "Robotics Studio" which will allow non-programmers to use a drag-and-drop environment for programming robots, a virtual environment for robot simulation, and a "runtime". The runtime is a piece of software that will allow a robot to understand the program (a set of instructions by any other name) written within Robotics Studio, and it is likely this piece is the one that will provide the consistency between different types of robotic hardware.
Microsoft is providing a free license for their new software provided that you use it for non-commercial purposes and use it on a limited number of robotic devices and PC computers. They also offer a commercial license for $399 USD which will allow you to use the software for business purposes and redistribute up to 200 copies of the runtime components... essentially limiting you to sell only two hundred robots.
While there are many free and open source software systems for designing, programming and running robots, I think that Microsoft's entry into this market is a strong one that will make robot programming more accessible to business and people that might not have otherwise been able to afford the time or talent. I'll be watching the Microsoft bots closely, and will be waiting to hear their famous catch phrase change from "Where do you want to go today?" to a personal robot asking "How may I serve you today?"
Visit the website http://microsoft.com/robotics to find out more on Microsoft's move into Robotics.