First of all, I wanted to say hi to everyone here! This is my "official" first post. Yes, I'm a newbie/freshman, haha! A friend of my company (Trossen Robotics) had asked me and some of my coworkers to share some of our knowledge on these forums. We'll be sharing knowledge in more robotic development related areas, but I couldn't hesitate to post in this forum after I saw it
After reading everyone's posts in this forum, Tom, I believe is pretty much right on the money. From what I understand about it, the possibilities of Microsoft Robotics Studio (we did a little bit of beta testing) are near endless.
In a nutshell, companies create 3rd party tools which basically expose their hardware and software as web services. This allows you to control your Robot remotely via Web Services and Messages, thus putting all of the processing on a separate computer. Your robot transmits data back to the computer, and using your own high-level programming language, you decide what you want to do with that data. As Tom had said, it provides a way to allow many different hardware devices to talk to each other that previously could not do so. Additionally, with the new Express languages being free, there is no more cost for Microsoft languages and their IDE's either.
In regards to the question about what companies will/have partnered up with Microsoft with Robotics Studio, you can check out their partner page to get an idea of how large this is getting (make sure to look at the companies you never heard of):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/P...s/default.aspx
The major benefit of this level of PC based robotics is that enables developers to eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel, ie. build a robot basically from scratch, each and every time they decide to develop a robot. Sure, this may be fun for some, but for a lot of people and companies, this is a really hard, if not unattainable goal. This is one of the reasons why commercial robotics is only at the point it is now, and why you don't see robots at every street corner. As I'm sure all of you above anyone else can appreciate; a lot of time, effort, and money go into building a robot.
Fast forward to the future, and see what benefits this will give all of us: bigger, faster, stronger, speedier development, and most of all, more intelligent robots! Everyone can now build off of each others ideas, find out what succeeds and what fails.
In essence, it's not really any different than what FIRST does now, btw, I am a HUGE fan of you guys
I can't wait to check out some competitions myself! I like to look at Robotics Studio as taking robotics to the next level. Could you imagine... life-size humanoid competitions?
BTW, for anyone who is interested, we are developing a Robotic System that we hope to someday expose it as web services to plug into Robotics Studio. Although the beta version to the public won't be available for quite some time, you can read what it's all about here:
http://www.trossenrobotics.com/trs/trs.aspx