Microsoft Robotics Studio

Microsoft's robotic studio may well be another way of Microsoft trying to gain a monopoly, it would seem churlish not to at least check it out. In any case, people ask about, so could be good idea to be informed.

Microsoft visual studio includes a simulated P3-DX, so it seems, at first appearance, that it might actually be useful tool of this project. However running the simulator is not very intuitive.

When starting Pioneer 3DX stimulation, a 3-D scene appears reminiscent VRML type display, The simulated robot has bumpers and 16 sensors, so it would have to be changed to match our robots. When the simulation starts, the type window appears showing the loading of the robot. There is also the scene that had mentioned, and the dashboard, which can be used to control the robot. Using the dashboard is not intuitive.


These are the steps that need to be performed to use the dashboard:
1. Enter the computer name, the localhost is supposed to work, but doesn't seem to.
2. Enter the port number, which is one more than the port number shown in the console type window mentioned earlier.
3. Press the connect button. If this is successful, there will be two lines of text, looking like rather obscure directories, and appears in a large box below.
4. Next, you must double-click the line that contains the word motors, to turn the motors on. Left of that box there is a label indicating whether the motors on off.
5. Once the motors are on you can press the button labelled Drive.
6. Now you may use the 'sphere' above the stop button to drive the robot. (If you happen to have a joystick you can use that, but I have never owned one.)


You can turn the laser on and see a representation of the computers laser vision at the bottom of the dashbord. The dashboard is shown in the picture above. Here is a picture of the simulated environment, showing the obstacles that the laser vision is picking up. Unfortunately the Uni only has one laser range finder to share between the five robots, so I am planning to do this project without lasers.

Also you can change the camera view to robot eye view. Apart from that, the basic simulation is not very interesting. If the robots are one of this her a call or cylindrical obstacles they roll off to infinity, as if there is no friction in this environment.

I have yet to determine whether this is going to be a useful simulation environment or not. If I do use this tool, it will beat to work on Vision Systems, so the physics won't be particularly important.