Robotics and Software

There is an interesting article in this month's Scientific American about robots, by Bill Gates. It mostly talks about the need to have some standard, underlying frameworks and common building blocks in the software space for robotics to really take off. Of course Microsoft is getting into this in a big way. One interesting idea that was in the article is the notion of using the robot as only a mechanism for remote sensory and then using networking technologies to send the sensory input back to a more powerful computer for processing (Gates says your desktop, I'm sure it could likely be a server farm as well). Sounds like Gates may finally be coming aroung to McNealy's mantra of "the network is the computer". Anyway, MS has put out a robotics software toolkit called Microsoft Robotics Studio that looks pretty interesting. It apparently works with Lego Mindstorms too, so it should be accessible to the hobbyist like myself. The coolest thing about this studio is that it has a full virtual testing environment built in so you don't actually even need a hardware robot to build something, you write your robotics code and then test it out in the virtual environment. If you have the hardware you could then upload your program to it.