Robotics is the future of market. Until today developing a robotic application was a tedious job because their was no common development platform to provide you with an ease of developing. Microsoft has recently launched a set of cool tools called Microsoft Robotics Studio. These tools will provide all the developers with a Windows-based development environment for creating robotic software for a wide variety of hardware platforms.

These new tools feature a visual programming language that enables nonprogrammers to easily program robots using a drag-and-drop environment, a 3-D tool that simulates robotics applications in physics-based virtual environments, using the licensed PhysX ™ engine from AGEIA ™ Technologies Inc and a lightweight, services-oriented runtime that enables applications to communicate with a wide variety of hardware.

The users have appreciated these entire features and more than 10,000 copies of this software have already been downloaded. The Microsoft offers this software absolutely free for educational and personal use.

How Microsoft plans to turn its free toolkit into a business is unclear. It will charge $399 for every developer who uses the Microsoft Robotics Studio to create a commercial robot. About 30 commercial partners have already signed aboard, so they will buy the software.

Such a common platform will surely speed-up the development of robotics as it provides the developers with wild opportunity of experimentations.

Via: Yahoo!