As you may have already heard, yesterday, Microsoft announced its foray into the robotics marketplace/hobby community with the release of their free (for now) Windows-based environment for creating robotic control applications. Concurrent with the Microsoft announcement (at RoboBusiness Con 2006), Carnegie Mellon University announced its plans to open a Center for Robotics Innovation (with funding from Microsoft). The Center will maintain a website for hobbyists, academics, and commercial companies to share robotics ideas, technology and software.
At Street Tech, we’ll reserve judgement on whether this is ultimately a good thing for robotics or just another area of technology where good wares and real innovation is going to be paved over by the MS juggernaut. The fear is that robotics could be the next area of technology to fall victim to Microsoft’s tendency to “embrace, extend, and extinquish.” It’ll be interesting to see what roboticists (who aren’t on Microsoft’s payroll) think of these new tools as they make their way into the real world.
Here’s Robot Mag’s coverage of the announcement.
Here’s the MSDN Site
Here’s where CMU’s Center for Robotics Innovation will end up.
Here’s an article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
And last, but not least, here’s a video from Channel 9, an interview with Tandy Trower of the MS Robotics Group.