Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Video and more on Microsoft Robotics

Wow! All I can say after watching the new video Microsoft released yesterday on the Microsoft Robotics Group is WOW!

To put that "Wow" into context, it is important to realize that I used to run the company Robonetics, that built software for robots. Our projects were all about building better SDK's for robots. The "state" the video talked about, we had the same concept in our own RIDL and Agent# languages. But I am stunned. This is amazing stuff Microsoft is coming out with.

There is so much in this SDK. There is the runtime that runs on various computers. The scalable architecture. The concurrency library. The distributed services. The high performance simulator with graphics and physics. The code that can be reused from one robot to the next. The simple rewiring of software blocks. Fifteen tutorials online. And above all, the ability for third parties to leverage the platform, much like applications leverage Windows.

And the applications that go beyond robotics are just everywhere. There is so much that the same principles could achieve outside of robotics. I hope everyone in the Multi-Agent Systems community takes notice. People in the Ambient Intelligence community too.

It's just to much! I don't know where to start covering this. But this is a seminal product. I believe it will also make the Lego Mindstorms NXT a much more capable platform than I previously thought it would be. And that's saying something.

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