Microsoft Robotics

I recently wrote a post concerning the Microsoft XNA Game Studio. By extending the learning of this technology, I discovered that the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) shares the same rendering engine. But the toolkit dedicated to robotics includes also a runtime – which must be familiar to Windows® Communication Framework (WCF) developers - and a Visual Programming Language (VPL) tool.

WCF – Windows Communication Foundation

WCF is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications.
It provides mainly integration and interoperability with existing .NET Framework distributed systems technologies such as Message Queuing (MSMQ), COM+, ASP.NET Web services, Web Services Enhancements (WSE).

Visual Simulation Environment

Source : Microsoft Robotics Developer Center

The Simulation Environment is composed of the following components:

¬ Simulation Engine Service – is responsible for rendering entities and progressing the simulation time for the physics engine.
¬ Managed Physics Engine Wrapper – abstracts the user from the low level physics engine API.
¬ Native Physics Engine Library – enables hardware acceleration through NVIDIA PhysX™ Technology.
¬ Entities – represent hardware and physical objects in the simulation world. A number of entities come predefined with the RDS.

Visual Programming Language

Source : Microsoft Robotics Developer Center

Microsoft Visual Programming Language (VPL) is an application development environment designed on a graphical dataflow-based programming model. I already noticed this type of approach for the Aviary Peacok application,

Source : Aviary Peacok application

and for the GOSTAI urbiLive graphical behavior editor

 Source : GOSTAI URBI Studio

I you want to know more , read the wikipedia article about visual programming language.

CCR & DSS Toolkit

The purpose of this toolkit is to provide access to the core technologies in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) outside the area of robotics and at the same time start the process for integrating the technologies within the .NET Framework. In other words, it’s a way to give access to the Microsoft Robotics technology without the Robotics Developer Studio

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a managed code library, a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL), accessible from any language targeting the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CCR addresses the need of service-oriented applications to manage asynchronous operations, deal with concurrency, exploit parallel hardware and deal with partial failure.

Decentralized Software Services (DSS) provides a lightweight, state-oriented service model that combines representational state transfer (REST) with a formalized composition and event notification architecture enabling a system-level approach to building applications. DSS uses Decentralized Software Services Protocol (DSSP) and HTTP as the foundation for interacting with services.

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Don’t lose time. Read my pages about  Microsoft Robotics and GOSTAI URBI to obtain a complete set of information about these technologies.

I robotly recommend this technology.

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