Robotics Operating System?

Full Article : http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5391

(c) Adapted by http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5391

Compared with the Microsoft's billion-dollar businesses—Windows, MSN, Xbox, and more, we don't hear much about the development of robotics. But indeed, the company has undergone a project which involves 11 of its 76000 employees to create Robotics Studio 1.0.

For now, the robotics world is rife with devices that don't easily work together or with standard programming tools. Take the Create for example. The Create is a generalized, programmable version of the popular Roomba vacuum-cleaning robot. To manipulate it, you have to write C or C++. If you want to add some additional devices to it, you still have write more code to integrate it on to the robot. Moreover, if you swap out the unit to a different kind of robot, you have to reprogram it all over again. It seems really troublesome, doesn't it?

Good robotics programming is far harder than writing a typical application for personal computers. Each component is expected to act autonomously and react to complicated events in the world of a kind that a printer or mouse never has to deal with.

Robotics Studio, released in December, aims to handle much of that complexity for robot programmers. It isn't an operating system. But manufacturers will use it to write software for their robotic components much as a maker of a device that hooks up to a PC does, whether it's a printer, an LCD display, or a data-acquisition sensor. Once such a service is written—telling, for example, a robotic arm to move up or down, grip or release, rotate n degrees, and so on—the action can be done with a single instruction. And when you substitute a new arm, the same commands work in the same way, so a minimum of reprogramming is needed. Microsoft's software, in other words, will do what MS-DOS and then Windows did: nurture an ecosystem in which new devices spawn new programs for more and more end users who in turn inspire yet more innovation—the same virtuous cycle that brought explosive growth to the cottage PC industry 25 years ago.

Are ubiquitous robots, dreamed of for millennia, in our immediate future, or are they still a number of years over the horizon? At least the world Mundie imagined seven years ago is here, with data centers filled with multiprocessor servers and desktops everywhere sporting multicore personal computers for less than $2000. We're about to see whether the other half of his and Trower's and Gates's vision is correct. Will the new processors lead us away from PCs and toward a future filled with robots—robots running Microsoft's software?