Here is a heap of 15 free video tutorials on MRDS. The Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is a Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation.

You must click on this link to Download Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.

Be sure to click on the following site to view a list of webcasts: Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio

The Albert Einstein robot in this webcast was not developed with MRDS, but it does help to provide you with some inspiration. (All the other videos in this post do deal with robots that are supported by Microsoft Robotics.)

Note: If you want to really understand robotics concepts and theories, you may want to check out Stanford’s Introduction to Robotics.

4 Divisions of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio:

Bunny's First Lego Mindstorms NXT Robot
Lego Mindstorms NXT
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Ixmati

* DSS (Decentralized Software Services) Is the services architecture, and it is a companion to CCR. This is based on Service Oriented Architecture. This allows one to author applications that are very distributed and modular. This allows you to execute your code in the processing work horses and use anywhere in the distributed environment. The DSS makes it simple to access, and respond to, a robot’s state via a Web browser or Windows-based application. This allows real-time monitoring of robotics sensors and real-time response to motors and actuators.

* CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) – makes asynchronous programming simple. The CCR makes it simple to author programs to handle asynchronous input from multiple robotics sensors and output to motors and actuators. With the use of CCR, we don’t need to do any manual threads management. This can be particularly worthwhile in handling concurrency and partial failure. CCR has a failure handling mechanism called Causalities. This is basically a generalization of Try / Catch for multiple threads. But this is for many machines and processes working in synchronous fashion. This is the base of Robotics architecture by Microsoft. You can even use this component for the applications running on a PC instead of a robot. CCR is available in the form of a dynamic link library which can be used by any .net language.

* VPL (Microsoft Visual Programming Language) Is a visual programming tool that is used for creating and debugging robot applications, web-based and windows-based interfaces.

* VSE (Visual Simulation Environment) Allows one to simulate the behavior of robots in a virtual world using NVIDIA PhysX technology (3D engine) that includes advanced physics.

The Runtime environment Has two elements: the CCR and the DSS. The runtime is based on a lightweight REST-oriented services model. Making it REST based has made the services and applications to be independent of each other. They may be on the same machine or distributed across several machines connected through any method. When we talk pertaining to REST based, This implies that the resources should be available by query strings. These services are available as resources to the other services, applications or User Interfaces. This is, in reality, how Microsoft is able to promise low coupling across services. The Runtime supports from 8-bit to 32-bit robots. These robots may range from Toy Robots to Industrial Robots.

Microsoft VPL Robotics programs simply. All you need to do is drag and drop blocks that represent services, and connect them. It is also possible to take a collection of connected blocks and reuse them as a single block somewhere else in the program. VPL follows the Observer Pattern. This means that it is not based on Control flow but on data flow which allows some program elements to get executed when some data arrives. VPL provides a model-driven approach to develop and orchestrate services.

Easily Simulate Robotics applications using realistic 3D simulated models. Since testing with real robots is often expensive, it saves money to start out in a simulated environment first and then move to real robots once the concepts have been proven to work. Microsoft Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) is based on Microsofts XNA Framework and the rendering engine uses AGEIA PhysX Technology from AGEIA Technologies Inc.. AGEIA Technologies Inc. Is a pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics, enabling real-world physics simulation for robot models. PhysX simulations may also be accelerated using AGEIA hardware. These simulations can be recorded and saved as XML files and played back over and over again.

Please click on the following website to look at a related post: Toy Robots

Key Features of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio:

* Reuse Modular Services Using a Composable model

Manufacture high-level functions using simple parts, providing for reuse of code modules as well as better reliability and replaceability. For example, a lower-level sensor service could be integrated into a navigation service.

Supported Robots:

Evolution Nao.jpg

Aldebaran Robots

Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Burgermac

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