Entries tagged with robotics - Channel 9

Talking about Microsoft Robotics and VPL with Trevor Taylor

John O'Donnell — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:19:00 GMT

During my last visit to the Microsoft Redmond Campus Trevor Taylor from the Microsoft Robotics team was kind enough to talk to me about the Microsoft Robotics platform and in particular Visual Programming Language or VPL. Of course when you talk aout robotics there is always an opportunity to talk about other cool technology such as the simulation environment and the great things our partner http://www.simplysim.net are doing with it.

If this video peaks your interest in Microsoft Robotics then take a look at the book Trevor co-authored with Kyle Johns

John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

This Week on C9: Xbox & Zune get updates, C9 gets custom CSS, and autonomous trucks!

Dan Fernandez — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:33:00 GMT

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian are joined by Steve Velat, a PhD student at Univ. of Florida working on cool autonomous robots. This week's news includes:

- Microsoft store launches (1:00 - 1:40)
- The New Xbox Experience is now available including new services like NetFlix, new avatars, and XNA Community games (1:51 - 3:37)
- Windows Live OneCare is discontinued, but Morro will be a free lightweight offering...60% of developed nations don't have up-to-date security protection (higher in emerging markets) (3:37 - 5:09)
- Zune Pass update means that every month you can own 10 songs (5:09 - 6:23)
- Omar Shahine discusses Windows Live updates, and New York Times declares Microsoft the winner of Social Inbox 2.0 (6:23 - 7:40)
- Live Search API adds XML, JSON APIs, removes query limit, and enables you to specify Web, news, images, phonebook, Encarta Instant Answers, etc for search results (7:40 - 9:17)
- CodeProject article shows building a Pan & Tilt camera with object tracking using LEGO NXT (9:17 - 10:25)
- The 9 guy, Brian, and Dan make it on to Microspotting (10:25 - 11:12)
- Rico Mariani, the architect for Visual Studio tooling, discusses the Visual Studio Technology Roadmap (11:12 - 13:10)
- OnMicrosoft video site launches, includes interviews with the Microsoft product teams (13:10 - 14:00)
- Channel 9 dev team adds user-generated CSS extensions and Jamie's built some cool ones already (14:00 - 15:00)
- Charles has a two-part video series with Brian Beckman on state monads and concurrency, Part 1 and Part 2 (15:00 - 15:46)
- Dan's pick of the week: Dan declares Wrath of the Lich King is the most extensible and popular game on the planet. (15:46 - 18:15)
- Brian's pick of the week: Greg Duncan's find on extending VSTS Power Tools with Skype to talk directly to teammates (18:15 - 19:20)
- Steve's pick of the week: Robotic Assisted Convoy Operation - A video clip of automated transport vehicles using IR emitters to drive actual convoy trucks (19:20 - end)

Channel 9 on Mars: Inside the Mars Exploration Mission - Past, Present and Future

Charles — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:33:00 GMT

While in LA for PDC2008, we were lucky enough to get the chance to head down to Pasadena for a tour and interview at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Nic Fillingham and I grabbed a cab and met up with the great Marc Mercuri (of RoboChamps fame), DPE's VP Walid Abu-Hadba and others to get a look at the JPL Mars Rover facility and meet some of the folks behind the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Our guide was the venerable Dave Lavery who is the Program Executive for Solar System Exploration at NASA.

This is a fascinating glimpse into the world of solar system exploration from the perspective of robotics and software design (Dave was a major contributor to the robotics design and development efforts behind (and in) the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity).

Tune in and learn about some of the challenges of developing autonomous machines that you will never get to touch again (think about the reduncancy requirements for a robot rover that is deployed 100 million miles away from Earth...). It's really exciting that the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity will be joined on the red planet by a new mobile robot equipped with an advanced laboratory capable of unparalleled experimentation and analysis. The folks at JPL think 100 million miles outside of the box!

We Love Robots

D. Begley — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:44:00 GMT

At Microsoft, we love Robots. Turns out, we’re not the only ones. Our friends at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have brought a full scale replica of the Mars Exploratory Rover to display in the “Big Room” next to the Robotics Booth. In addition, some of the actual engineers and scientists from the Pasadena lab working on the Rover will be on-hand to answer questions and geek out with PDC attendees. Make sure to stop by, get a picture of yourself with the Rover, and ask all those questions you have for the “rocket scientists” at NASA!

CoroWare Technologies: Mobile Robotics Integrator

Charles — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:01:00 GMT

CoroWare Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of CoroWare, Inc. (CROE.OB), is a systems and mobile robotics integrator. They’ve recently been awarded Microsoft Certified Gold Partner status. CoroWare has made their mark on Microsoft platforms through developing software and solutions for mobile service robotics and business automation. Here, we meet David Hyams, CTO for Coroware and learn more about how this company is shaping the future through technology developments to improve and simplify our lives.

Check out the Microsoft ISV site for more information related to partnering with Microsoft.

Tandy Trower: Robotics Update

Charles — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:17:04 GMT

We caught up with Tandy Trower recently to find out what's new with in Microsoft Robotics World, now named Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (got to love our naming schemes, eh?:)). The Robotics group has moved from Redmond to downtown studio. They are still a very small team, but they are now more of an official MS product team as opposed to an incubation group tied to MSR.

Tandy reflects on the current state of MSRDS 2008, robotics in general, RoboChamps competition and more. It's always fun to chat with Tandy, who's been at MS for almost 27 years now. Tandy pioneered Microsoft's foray into robotics and his small team has produced some amazing core technologies (DSS).

Enjoy.

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This Week on Channel 9: April 25th Episode

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:23:50 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Dan and Ed cover:

- Channel 10 clip showing the Live Mesh end user application (7 - 9:10)
- Dan and Ed talk about the Live Mesh dev platform and architecture (9:10 - 13:30)
- Dan and Ed brainstorm ideas for using Mesh (13:30 - 17:30)
- Clip of Ori Amiga show how a Silverlight Web app can work both locally and offline, and then sync back to the cloud using Mesh (20:20 - 23:50)
- Dan and Ed brainstorm more Mesh ideas (23-50 - 25:11)
- Photobucket launches their developer API via Alvin Ashcraft (25:20 - 26:54)
- Dan's Pick of the Week: Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror post on old-school BASIC (26:54 - 30:30 )
- Ed's Pick of the Week: RoboChamps.com launches, a simulated environment for robots to compete 30:30 - end

- Low res version
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Marc Mercuri and Kyle Johns: Inside RoboChamps

Dan Fernandez — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:14:10 GMT

Charles talks to Software Developer Kyle Johns and Architect Marc Mercuri about Microsoft’s new simulated robotics competition, RoboChamps. A number of subjects were discussed from the technologies used in the competition (and it’s supporting website, RoboChamps.com), how Enterprises are finding the underlying technologies useful for more than just robots, and a first look at one of the 3-D ‘worlds’ participants will be using.

- Low res version
- MP4 version

For more information on RoboChamps, visit:
- RoboChamps Website
- Channel 10 Overview of RoboChamps
- Robotics Homepage
- Robotics: A New Approach

Robotics: A new approach

JonUdell — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:26:00 GMT

In this podcast, Jon Udell invites Tandy Trower and Henrik Nielsen to explain why robotics is taking off, and how their new approach to the technology will generalize to a broad range of scenarios.

JU: So you were just in Japan. What did you see and do?

TT: We were at IREX, the international robotics exhibition in Tokyo. All forms of robots were there, heavily dominated by industrial robots. That was the big-ticket item. But we were in a smaller section that focused on this new market, service robots, which are moving into new areas. Industrial robots have done the dangerous, dull, and dirty jobs. Now there's a new market coming, where robots move outside the factories and into the homes.

It's a dramatic change. Industrial robots are very expensive, they require special operators, they perform repetitive functions, and they're dangerous for humans to interact with. But that market is starting to flatten out. So a lot of the vendors in that area, including one of our best supporting partners, Kuko, one of the top industrial robotic arm manufacturers in the world, is looking for new markets, and very anxious to engage with us in this new service, or personal, robotics market.

Bill Gates reflected this in his January article in Scientific American, where he likened the personal and service robotics world to the PC world in the 1970s. The personal computer market, in its infancy, looked kind of weird. You had the Commodore PET, which had a strange little keyboard and saved programs to cassette, you had the Apple II. The transition we see in this robotics market now is very similar to what we saw coming out of that era, and even the industrial vendors are starting to look to this new market as a place to go.

JU: In this case, there's also a particular demographic driver: aging populations create the need for these personal assistants in the home. And in Japan, in particular, there's a special interest in companionable robots.

TT: Yes. In Japan and in many Asian countries, there's much more interest in the social aspect of robots. It's partly cultural, they grew up with AstroBoy and the idea that robots were friendly companions. So you're right, one of the biggest motivating factors is this aging of the population. I face this myself. My father-in-law is 84, he lives on his own, he needs help from his family to be able to live independently. It certainly would be helpful if we had more technology that would allow us to stay in touch with him, remind him to take his medications, connect him better with his health care providers, these are all things that robots could perform.

It's also the case that in the Asian countries, because of family and cultural traditions, it's more important to take care of your elders.

JU: So if the analogy is to the early PC era, then you're providing what is, in a sense, DOS.

TT: Exactly.

HN: I actually think robotics can grow far beyond where the PC started out. Because the PC, until very recently, had a fairly uniform form factor. You could rely on a screen and a keyboard and a mouse, and that dictated what the user interface can be. As soon as you start having what I call more context-aware applications, things that know where you are, what you are doing, what the surroundings are doing -- and not just the local environment -- this causes the computation and the applications to be completely different. They are inherently part of the environment. They have to become much more aware, and the ways you interact with them have to become more aware. You might want to use speech for some things, or touch, or just you being there in person so it can track you using heat, or motion.

Robotics hardware has come a long way in terms of price, functionality, and flexibility. But service robots have yet to reach a level of usefulness that defines how they might be able to take off. There are some obvious entertainment opportunities, and remote presence opportunities, but beyond that we're only in the beginning phase of figuring out what these applications look like.

And we actually think it applies not only to robotics but also to how you might start thinking about interaction with information systems in general.

TT: And that's been one of the challenges. How do you create applications like this, where you have a lot of things going on? PCs have had it easy. They just sit there, they take the keyboard input, the mouse input, but when they have to go and sense things in our environment, and actually operate in our environment, it takes a much more complex model. How do you deal with all these different sensory inputs that are coming in at the same time? How do you deal with controlling the activations of many different things at the same time? This, we believe, is not just a model for robotics, but is a model for software of the future.

JU: Absolutely, because there no longer is the illusion of god-like control of the machine. In the early PC network, pre-network, you really did make the rules and you really did have that control. But in the network era, and now as the network extends into the physical world, you're an actor on a stage with a number of other actors running around with their own agendas. It becomes a negotation, a game of interaction. So yes, it absolutely mandates a different model, and that model extends equally to loosely-coupled services that communicate by sending messages over the network.

TT: Yes, a model that deals with the inherent complexity of concurrency, and the coordination or orchestration of what's going on. This was the whole reason for choosing the CCR and DSS pieces for robotics. This was actually an advanced programming model designed not for robotics per se, but as a general purpose programming model. We put it into the robotics SDK as a way to test this out, but now we're seeing that people are lifting the hood on the engine inside this SDK and finding other uses for it. We have people who are using it to build trading systems, who are doing large data-set scientific modeling, the folks at MySpace are using it to manage their server farms.

JU: So let's review, for people who may not have followed the story. The CCR, which is the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, and DSS, which stands for Decentralized Software Services, are projects that were in the works, and had a relationship to one another, prior to their incorporation into the robotics kit. Is that true?

TT: Yes, that's right.

HN: Yes, absolutely. DSS is built on top of CCR. By way of background, the challenge was to answer the question: What is the programming and application model when it's no longer true that you have a single process running on a single cpu on a single machine? We think that is already no longer true. When you look down you see many cores under you that operate concurrently...

JU: And many nodes on the network...

HN: That's right, and when you look up you see many nodes on the network, and you want to have your application function in that environment. In fact you need to define what an application is. If you are in fact building a composition of services you need to deal with the concurrency, but also about messages flowing around in the system. It becomes much more autonomous computing. And this is why it fits nicely with robotics. It's about sensing, get a huge amount of input from the environment in a very asynchronous and loosely-coupled way.

Everything becomes an autonomous unit. And each can be participating in many different applications at the same time, without even knowing it...

JU: Or not participating, because some of them went AWOL, but that's OK because you have the redundancy to handle that.

HN: Exactly. The web has been trying to push toward this model for a long time, and now the appearance of many-core CPUs has started to push toward it. So the whole idea of an application, which hasn't changed for 30 years, now has to change. And that's the question we tried to answer when we started out with CCR and DSS. They work nicely together. One provides a programming model, the other provides an application model, that together fits nicely around messaging, as you said. We think it leads you down a path of building very robust, scalable, and flexible applications.

JU: So in this context how do you define an application?

HN: It is a composition of a set of loosely-coupled services that function individually. Kind of like in a mashup environment. You have a variety of inputs, a different set of outputs that you want to be able to affect, it is the orchestration of messages going in and out. It's the collection -- it is effectively, when you look at it, a graph of services that you start thinking of as your application.

JU: And a ruleset.

HN: And a ruleset, yes, exactly. So it's about having a set of services hooked together, and ruleset for how to orchestrate messages over that set. And it's about partial failure, and redundancy, because you don't have control over all of these services. Some run locally, some run across the network, some run in the cloud. You want to be able to leverage them all, and hook new things in.

Here's a very practical problem from a robotics point of view. You might have had your robot in the home for a couple of years. It has learned where you go, it knows your calendar, it knows a bunch of things about you. Now you might get another robot. Rather than wait a couple of years for it to get up to speed on what you think matters to it, you might want to be able to hook into the same application context. It's a web of information that you want the new guy to be able to hook into. It's all about the connectedness of applications.

TT: And of course this is the way that living systems operate, whether we're talking about the cellular structure of our bodies, or our neural systems, or even full ecosystems. It's all based on the fact that the nodes themselves have a certain importance, but it's the connectivity through the nodes -- the way they communicate with one another -- that provides the inherent power. Our own neural system is a massive network. The individual nodes provide insignificant data, yet they pass these messages along, and through the orchestration of these connections we get the ability to see, or to hear, or to be able to function in our world.

JU: Biomimicry, that's the ticket. Nature's already done all this R and D, why don't we piggyback on what it's already figured out.

TT: Exactly. When I first looked at applying the technology that Henrik was working on, that was one of the areas I looked at. Now it turns out that biologically inspired techniques are still in a crude stage, so my second attempt was to apply this to robotics because it's a more practical technology that may eventually evolve toward more biologically inspired technologies.

Again, this whole model was never designed to be exclusively for robotics. It was designed to be a programming model for the future that would enable a new generation of applications. We've been trying to create them, today, as if they were all on a single neuron. What this technology says is that with the trends that are coming -- Intel and AMD both now shipping 4-core systems, 8-cores coming next year, how are we going to manage all this power? And the Internet shows us that we've already moved past the idea of running a single application that runs on a single core on a single machine, that's just obsolete. How do you reduce the overall complexity when your application runs in five different places at the same time? Is it even a solvable problem? Well it turns out that the CCR and DSS have solved that problem, they do provide that programming model. And that's not just me saying that, we have customers who are embracing them because they are helping solve these complex problems.

JU: One of the challenges, as we see in the web services space, is that when the application becomes a set of actors on the stage, with a lot of other actors, how do I know that I'm meeting my requirements, how do I test? I think these are all extensions of things we know how to do, but still, it changes the game.

HN: Oh, it changes dramatically. We hold the basic assumption that bad things happen, and things fail for unknown reasons. In the case of robotics it works beautifully, because the robot falls off the cliff, and it's gone. But you can't just stop. It would be smart to say, well, don't do what that thing did. Try to avoid falling off the cliff. That's where this magic term loose coupling comes in. It's often seen as a good thing to do, an important architectural principle, but in fact how to do it turns out to be difficult. How can you write an application that can fail partially without the rest of it going down?

JU: How do you evaluate the performance of an application? We're used to a model where the testable performance is discrete. It did or didn't do this function. But in this world, it tends toward the probabilistic.

HN: Oh, absolutely.

JU: It's not whether it vacuumed the room or not, but how well did it do that? And over a series of trials, how did that average out? It's fuzzier.

HN: Yes. Of course people already know that on the web, when they use search engines. They know they'll get a decent response, but an exact snapshot is just not possible.

JU: It won't be authoritative or complete.

HN: It's a snapshot of a moment in time. I think a lot of the applications we deal with will have to think about that, and be organized around that. And that boils down to, well, I have information, how do I orchestrate it, how do I put weights on the different pieces of information? And how do I spread it around so I can build something that doesn't freeze?

TT: Related to that, what do you do when one of your program components does freeze up, or crashes. In this world, it's fine. If you lose one of the services in the set, because its state is separated out, you can drop the service or restart it or replace it...

JU: And reattach the state to another instance of the service.

TT: Exactly. What do you do when you find out that code has failed? Do you reboot the system? Do you remove the whole application? Or do you just surgically go in there and remove or fix one piece? I mean, we lose cells all the time, and they're replaced, and yet we don't have to be rebooted every time a new cell comes in. It just fits into the network, finds its place, replaces the old one, and we continue on. Software needs that kind of resiliency. You need to do that kind of surgical maintenance.

Back to robotics, the classical model was this. You read your sensors, you decide what to do about that sensory input, and then you effect your actuators. The problem with that was twofold. First it's very brittle. You get one wrong instruction, you bring the whole application down. Second, while you're processing your sensory input or actuator outputs, you're not reading your sensors. So at the time you should be noticing that you're running into the wall, you're telling the wheels to move forward.

The fact that we talk about this as orchestration is a very apt metaphor. What happens in an orchestra, what does a conductor do? He has a lot of people playing at the same time, his task is to make sure that it all blends together and sounds beautiful. This is the key, this is the programmer's challenge in the future. How are they going to keep an application flowing that way? It needs a simple model, but one that is scalable from the lowest level of abstraction to the highest level. That's what we believe we have here in the CSS/DSS companionship.

JU: I was going to ask how you begin to instill this way of doing things into a new generation of programmers, but I think I got the answer in a recent conversation with Matt MacLaurin, in the Creative Systems Group. He's developing a thing called Boku, which is both a game and a game development system, but all on these same principles. A kid puts an object into the world, then declares what are the goals or the reactions that it can have. Then you start to get emergent things happening, and you are learning to operate in a world which is much like the one you're describing. You're not controlling this world. You're injecting things into it that participate and interact, and you need to shape those interactions.

HN: Robotics offers a lot of excitement in terms of education. It ties together a lot of technologies, in terms of science, math, applied technologies like vision and audio, and also computer science. So it's a powerful vehicle for getting attention from students.

So we had this problem, people said, well, if you want to use it for computer science, then computer science 101 has to be a for loop, or a function call...

JU: Sorting.

HN: Sorting, exactly. And we said, well, we think it might be interesting to expose this model of distribution and concurrency directly. We don't think the students will freeze up, they are already aware of the asynchronicity from IM and email.

JU: This is what Matt is doing, actually. It's beautiful. So, to make this concrete, let's come back to home automation. In the case of HealthVault, currently, any of the home health devices that connect to it will be satellites of the PC. But you're imagining a model where the home is more of a network of...well, in a sense, the entire home is a complex robot.

HN: My view is that the P in the PC will go away. Because it's about computers in the network, and the connectedness of them, and the fact that you want them to be orchestrated, but you don't really go and sit in front of any of them. When the robot's around you might do some stuff with it, then you go down into your basement that might do something else, but you want the information to be continuous.

JU: It's not like your cellphone, a thing that's permanently attached to you. When it's in your environment, you can interact with it, but it doesn't have to be there, and you can interact with lots of other things.

HN: Yes. Of course the cellphone has had clearly subordinate role to the PC, you dock it and synch it, but these devices are becoming full-fledged network devices. So again you have to have an application and programming model that allows you to build applications that can float around these devices as they come and go.

JU: And the support software is light enough for these devices?

HN: You mean in terms of CCR and DSS? Yes. We run today on Windows CE, and I think we can say for the next release we will run -- we are already running now -- on the micro framework, which doesn't have any Windows underneath, it's really running a very lightweight managed environment straight on top of the hardware. We can run on very small things. Light switches.

JU: Really?

HN: Yes. We run a limited version of what we have, but it's the same bits, fundamentally. We had a researcher in MSR implement a very lightweight version of our protocol, on a small device, and have it show up in our environment, without having to do anything else. It could be a light switch, a thermostat, a security alarm, any number of devices that don't do much computation but provide sensory input.

JU: So if somebody wants to get their feet wet with this, and do a little project that gives them a taste of what it's like, what would you recommend? I mean, they can get the kit, but what's a good example to try?

HN: There are a lot of people who'd be excited about going to the store and buying a robot, and that's great. But assuming you couldn't, what you would start with is the simulation environment. It allows you, without having touched a robot at all, to play around with a set of robots that we provide you with simulation models for. You can very easily, in 5 minutes, download the SDK and then get going with a robot that is only in the visual environment. However it's more than that, it is a fully physics-aware environment.

JU: Sensors, actuators...

HN: Yes, so when you bump into other things they will move, and if you made them very heavy, your robot will flip or crash. So you have a very easy way to get started.

JU: Thanks Tandy. And thanks, Henrik.

Feb 29: This Week on Channel 9

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:26:38 GMT

On this week's episode, Brian and Dan talk about
- GDC and GDC Impressions
- Launch Event
- SQL Merge statement for SQL Server 2008
- Popfly nominated for C|Net WebWare Award
- Microsoft Interoperability Announcement
- Power Toys Released
- Tools and APIs including Cake3 (via Jason Haley), Virtual Earth JavaScript IntelliSense, and Steve Holstad's Coding4Fun Twitter + Silverlight mashup
- Brian's Pick of the week: RobotTurk - Autonomous, Aerial helicopter using Robotics Studio, Virtual Earth, and Silverlight
- Dan's Pick of the week: The Apache Foundation visits Microsoft
- Coffeehouse News: Jamie's http://biztalk.net) is pretty darn cool. In general, it makes it easy to delegate identity and access control to a hosted service. In a more general sense, BizTalk Services make it easier to break through the boundaries that can keep software systems from talking to one another.

This video demonstrates how you can apply the capabilites of the BizTalk Services Identity Provider to manage the movements of a robot. Keep in mind that even though the scenario shown in the video is a bit cooky, the concepts are more broadly applicable. This was a lot of fun to make, and I hope you enjoy it.

Driving a Robot from my WIndows Mobile device using Robotics Studio

obloch — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:38:48 GMT

As I was preparing some demos for TechEd Developers Barcelona, I recorded one of them.
The purpose is to show how to use Robotics Studio to remotely drive a robot from a Windows Mobile device using Robotics Studio... seems complicated!
Finally not that much.

All steps are detailled in this screencast:
   - create a simple service with Visual Studio 2005
   - use Microsoft Visual Programming Language to create the Application
   - Generate the Compact Framework project
   - Deploy on Windows Mobile
   - Drive robot!

Andreas Ulbrich demonstrates the Microsoft Visual Programming Language

JonUdell — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:30:00 GMT

In an earlier screencast, Henrik Nielsen illustrates how the Microsoft Robotics Studio, building on top of the CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) and DSS (Decentralized Software Services) technologies, exposes a RESTful service-oriented architecture.

In this companion screencast, Andreas Ulbrich demonstrates VPL (Visual Programming Language), a diagram-oriented dataflow language. Although it was created for the Robotics Studio, it is -- as you'll see here -- a very general way to visualize, orchestrate, and debug message-driven services that run work in parallel.

RESTful Robotics: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen on the Microsoft Robotics Studio

JonUdell — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:08:26 GMT

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen used to work for the World Wide Web Consortium on some key pieces of infrastructure including the HTTP specification and libwww. He left the W3C in 1999 and now works for Microsoft where his current project is Robotics Studio, whose tagline is: "A Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware." What that description doesn't tell you, but today's screencast (Flash ) shows, is that the Robotics Studio is based on a RESTful architecture, and that applications are built by composing lightweight services in ways that will be instantly familiar to every web developer.

To drive home that point, much of the action in this screencast occurs in a web browser, where you'll see Henrik explore a distributed directory of services and view XML snapshots of the current state of bumpers, cameras, and laser range finders.

From a read-only perspective it's all HTTP GET, and you can do things like subscribe to robotic sensors using RSS feeds. When you control a robot, SOAP is used to optimize fine-grained updates. But either way it's a loosely coupled and late bound system that leverages the fundamental flexibility of web architecture in a very different domain. In one compelling demonstration of that flexibility, you'll see a generic controller -- which had been controlling the robot in Henrik's office with no prior knowledge of the device, purely by interface discovery -- switch over to a simulated robot and drive it by means of the same kind of discovery.

Singapore Sumo-Robot How-To Video #4: Understanding Your Robot's Code Methods

chewy — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:42:40 GMT

In this video, Shen Yizhe (MIC Tech Lead from NUS) and Tan Chun Siong (MSP from Singapore) will be going through the various methods that form the decision logics of the Sumo Robots.

At the end of this video, developers will be able to code their own decision logics and strategies for their Sumo Robots.

As this video contains "code views", we recommend you download the Full Video for the best view (38MB).

Singapore Sumo-Robot How-To Video #2: Understanding Your Robot's Inputs and Outputs

chewy — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:39:50 GMT

In this video, Shen Yizhe (MIC Tech Lead from NUS) will be showing developers where are the sensors physically located on the Sumo Robots and what are those sensors used for during a Sumo Robot Competition.

There appears to be a problem with the streaming media file redirecting to one of the other videos... we suggest you download the full video (7.84 MB).

Singapore Sumo-Robot How-To Video #3: Building Your First Robot

chewy — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:37:35 GMT

In this video, Shen Yizhe (MIC Tech Lead from NUS) and Yap Baofa (MSP from Singapore) will be discussing about the various steps which a developer has to take in order to write and deploy their first robots into the simulated environment which comes with the Sumo Robots Package released by the Robotics Studio Team.

After completing this video, developers will be able to understand the basic concepts in deploying their self-created robots into the simulator.

This video contains "code views" and we recommend you download the Full Video to clearly see the code details (48MB).

Singapore Sumo-Robot How-To #1: Getting the Robotics Bits

chewy — Mon, 21 May 2007 08:02:23 GMT

Singapore! Are you ready for our local Sumo-Robot competition with Microsoft Robotics Studio? If you are, check out the video on how YOU can get started on the competition using the VIRTUAL SUMO ROBOT.

Getting the virtual sumo ready on your machine should take about 20 mins! We have number of additional videos to show you the basics of the robot and guidance on how to code your logic.

In this video, Shen Yizhe (MIC Tech Lead from NUS) and Chewy Chong (MS Developer Evangelist) shows you where to get the bits, how to install and how to test your installation. The step by step details can be found at Chewy’s blog (http://verychewy.com).

Singapore’s first Sumo-Robot competition will take place at MEDC Singapore 2007 on 8 June in Suntec. Make sure you sign up to check out the event in person. We will have more competitions across the island over Summer 2007 so stay tuned.

Microsoft Robotics Tour: CCR, VPL, Simulation - Part 2

Charles — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:18:17 GMT

We recently went back to visit the Microsoft Robotics team to see what they're up to. As expected, they are very busy innovating! This is a four part series where we learn about what's new in CCR (and watch George code!), get a demo of the Visual Programming Language's debugger (outrageously cool stuff), get a demo of the robotics simulation environement and get a status report from team lead Tandy Trower.

Here (Part 2 of 4), we meet Paul Roberts, a software engineer on George's team. He shows us a demo of a visual debugger that is awfully cool. Check this out. Enjoy

See part 1 here.

Microsoft Robotics Tour: CCR, VPL, Simulation - Part 1

Charles — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:31:53 GMT

We recently went back to visit the Microsoft Robotics team to see what they're up to. As expected, they are very busy innovating! This is a four part series where we learn about what's new in CCR (and watch George code!), get a demo of the Visual Programming Language's debugger (outrageously cool stuff), get a demo of the robotics simulation environement and get a status report from team lead Tandy Trower.

Here, George takes us through what we'll be seeing in this tour and gives us an update on the CCR and how it's being used in the real world.

Enjoy!

here.

Revisiting WiMo - The Windows Mobile Robot

Rory — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:16:22 GMT

Brian Cross is, like, really smart. That's what I've decided.

He woke up one day and felt like building a robot...

...so he did.

He's come along way from his early attempts, and he now has multiple hardware platforms which all tie into a single brain. That brain is a Bluetooth-enabled Windows Mobile SmartPhone. There's also some stuff that runs on a PC which was built with some of the Robotics bits that are available with Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Brian uses the phone to direct the actions of the robots, as well as handle things like communications and image acquisition (yeah - these robots, like the various probes we've launched into space, like to send images back).

I was floored by what I saw. And, for those of you who like what you see here, Brian has posted directions on the official WiMo site which describe how to build a robot similar to the one you'll see in the video.

It's amazing what you can do with a computer, a phone, and a couple hundred bucks nowadays.

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab

Charles — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:52:09 GMT

What a treat. Scoble got a tour of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Lab in Pittsburgh, PA. Check out the soccer-playing robots. Oh, and see the art of discovery at the time it happened. "It worked!" And, not just fun robots either, the teams there are developing robots to help during heart surgery and other medical proceedures. It's very rare to get a tour like this, so enjoy!

Also check out the Microsoft Robotics Studio, which is a development platform that provides some highly innovative functionality for those of you interested in building robots or applications that require extensive loosely-coupled distributed parallelism(Remember the http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics

Robotics Group team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/MSRoboticsStudio/
MS Robotics Studio Feedback: http://connect.microsoft.com/roboticsstudio

Stewart Tansley - Take a tour around Microsoft Research faculty summit

The Channel 9 Team — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 22:51:48 GMT

Mike Hall took his camera over to interview Stewart Tansley, program manager on Research's University Relations team, and get a tour around Research's recent faculty summit. Lots of interesting stuff from university researchers around the world. From robots to video servers.

Mike Hall - Robot wars

The Channel 9 Team — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 22:41:20 GMT

A fun video of a recent Windows Embedded conference competition where attendees programmed robots to fight against each other.

Near the end of the seven-minute video attendees talk about what they did to soup up their robots.