Microsoft Robotics Studio Tutorial

Some people have been asking how to operate the Microsoft Robotics Studio. This Coding4Fun article, by Brian Peek, will walk you through how to use it. From the article:

"In this article, Brian Peek will demonstrate how to use Microsoft Robotics Studio to control the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. A simple remote-controlled robot will be built and controlled using C# and the MSRS Visual Programming Language (VPL)."

http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/07/16/3902344.aspx

There is also a Wii-type NXT remote tutorial one Coding4Fun.

Good luck with the Microsoft Robotics Studio!

Richard

Comments

Unknown said…
I really would like to know about the impression and expriences users have with the actual Robotics Studio version.
When I tried the 1.0 version in last winter, I liked the Service-Oriented concept (that abstracts from the actual robot platform implementation). However, I experienced the concrete implementation of the framework cryptic and unintuitive, very poorly documented and difficult to use.
Even for very simple tasks like creating a simple service for, say, driving a motor and reading a sensor, the effort was tremendeous and it was almost impossible to figure out how to actually do it (the advice "just dig through the source code of an existing service and try to figure out how to do it" from the newsgroup was not very helpful, was it?). I also didn't like the constraint that MSRS services are only remote clients on the PC (which contradicts my attitude towards real (i.e. autonomous) robots).

Yet, there may have been improvements since (we all know that there have been times when you'd better wait for version 2 or 3 of Microsoft products, haven't they?), and I didn't use the visual language (which was not fully available then).

So if you use it: I'd be grateful for comments and feedback here.
Lou Morris said…
I also had the same experience using MSRS. I think MS is trying to fit some of their web server technologies into robotics and automation, but their scheme only seems to be usefull for autonomous 'state' operation, and not fly-by-wire type data polling. It's too much overhead to do little, and may come in handy for controlling multiple robots/devices over networks. The concurency feature allows a programmer to run tasks simultaneously, but this is nothing new. Microsoft has a video demo of the MSRS, and the highlight is the pioneer robot bumping into a wall and saying 'oops'. I have not found any examples of fully autonomous robots using MSRS yet... Maybe they will pull out something clear in version 2.0
Tony Hirst said…
I'm starting from the basics with the Visual Programming language and Robotics studio, building up a set of examples of how to use each block:

Getting Started with VPL and MS Robotics Studio

The platform I'm focusing on is Mindstorms/RCX

tony

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