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Microsoft Moves into Robotics

September 5, 2006 /

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The software giant thinks it can make robotic engineering easier with a set of standards: its own of course.

Microsoft believes the demand for consumer, research, and military robots will grow significantly–and it wants to own the market.

At the annual RoboBusiness conference this past June, the software giant released the first "community technical preview" of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS). Now, in its second preview version, MSRS is both a product and the lynchpin of a new educational push: the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

Founded by Microsoft Research, Georgia Tech, and Bryn Mawr College, the computer science and robotics program is aimed at college and graduate students. Together, the product and program are designed to bypass small, cheap robots, such as the Roomba (see "Hacking the Roomba"), in favor of a world of robots that are more complex and PC-like.

By Daniel Turner

Full Story: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17419&ch=infotech