Microsoft Robotics Studio (1.5) Refresh

Brief Description

The Microsoft® Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. This installation package installs the Microsoft Robotics Studio along with samples and tutorials.

Overview

The goal of the Microsoft Robotics Studio is to supply a software platform for the robotics community that can be used across a wide variety of hardware, applicable to a wide audience of users, and development of a wide variety of applications. As a platform, our intent is also to enable third parties to supply support for new hardware, technologies, and tools, just as Microsoft Windows provides a platform for others to bring their products and technologies to the community of PC users. So while we may populate our platform with some of our own contributions, those should not be considered exclusive to tools or libraries provided by other parties looking to provide interesting technologies for this platform.

The Microsoft Robotics Studio delivers three areas of software:

A scalable, extensible runtime architecture that can span a wide variety of hardware and devices. The programming interface can be used to address robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors as well as 32-bit systems with multi-core processors and devices from simple touch sensors to laser distance finding devices.
A set of useful tools that make programming and debugging robot applications scenarios easier. These include a high quality visual simulation environment that uses the AGEIA Technologies™ PhysX™ engine.
A set of useful technology libraries services and samples to help developers get started with writing robot applications.

Our development environment runs on the platforms listed in the section "System Requirements". It can be used to support robots that support these platforms as well as robots that can be remotely controlled from a PC running a supported platform. The remote control can for example be through a serial port, Bluetooth®, RF or Wi-Fi. We provide information that can be used by hardware or software vendors to make their products compatible with our development platform.

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System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows CE; Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86); Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 editions; Windows Vista; Windows XP; Windows XP 64-bit

To use Microsoft Robotics Studio with .NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK):

.NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) (x86 or x64)

To use Microsoft Robotics Studio with Visual Studio 2005:

Any of the Visual 2005 Express Editions, Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition or Visual Studio 2005 Team System Edition

Simulation on 64-bit editions of Windows: The Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio runtime environment provides true 64-bit support when running on 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows. This allows applications to take full advantage of a 64-bit address space when available. However, the Visual Simulation Environment uses Microsoft XNA which runs in WOW64 mode on 64-bit editions of Windows. WOW64 is the x86 emulator allowing 32-bit Windows-based applications to run on 64-bit Windows. It is not possible for a single application to run in full 64-bit and in WOW64 at the same time and as a result the Visual Simulation Environment does not run on 64-bit editions of Windows.

Important: Microsoft Robotics Studio can be used to develop services that can be deployed on Windows CE. The development tools themselves do not run on Windows CE, only the services developed for Windows CE.

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Instructions

Important: Make sure you have the latest service pack and critical updates for the version of Windows that you are running. To find recent security updates, visit Windows Update.

Click the Download button on this page to start the download
Do one of the following:
- To start the installation immediately, click Run.
- To save the download to your computer for installation at a later time, click Save.
- To cancel the installation, click Cancel.

Important: This release uses Ageia Technologies™ PhysX™ engine version 2.6.0. Previous installations MUST be uninstalled manually using "Add or Remove Programs" from within the Control Panel.

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Additional Information

Although Microsoft Robotics Studio can be used with a variety of physical robots, it is not a requirement for using the Studio. The Microsoft Robotics Studio Simulation Engine enables software based simulation and visualization of robots.

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