05 May 2008
An army of robots you say??? Interesting...
)Published on May 5th, 2008 @ 09:35:03 am, using 444 words, 135 views
So I found out about this new project by microsoft a week or two ago. They launched it in late April. Called Microsoft Robotics Development Studio (MRDS). At first I thought it was a half baked way for MS to get into another market, but after looking at some of the technology behind the platform, it’s quite ingenious… It is really well made and well thought through.
The system is entirely centered around Visual Studio, developing for robots using any of the known .net languages (I am using C# for example). which really makes it easy to get into for existing developers. Also the entire system is done using Services, which is very nice (and very similar to current enterprise development trends right now).
Anyway, alongside the launch of the product, they launched a community driven contest. For anyone to participate in, free to download the software, and one other great feature I forgot to mention about MRDS… It allows 100% simulation of a real robot in a 3d environment. With full physics and everything. So you can write your code for the sim, test, debug, and play with it, then take that same code and it will run out of the box on the real thing. Very nice concept. Anyway the sim is included so no need to have a real robot to compete, because all the competitions are done in the simulated environment.
It’s very very cool. So I am working on my entry for the first challenge. We will see how it goes. Been a long time since I have written code for .net, so I am getting back up to speed there, and back in the day I worked with .net, I didn’t do any services stuff, (while I know about it from my IT work, I have never first hand coded in that paradigm). So It’s a bit of an adjustment for me.
Either way I am coming along alright. The first challenge is a maze, and I have the robot pretty reliably navigating the maze and avoiding obstacles. Now the main challenge is avoiding the traps placed throughout the maze, and finally improving efficiency and speed.
I have till the end of may, so we will see if I can win it.
(did I mention there are nice prizes for these challenges, in the form of REAL robots, that are worth a fair bit of money. Gives an opportunity for me to get a real robot to work on in the future that I normally wouldn’t be able to afford, so I hope I can win it!).
Well that’s all for now, I will update later as things progress!
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