At the recent RoboDevelopment Conference Microsoft announced the final release of Robotics Studio 2008 (RDS). RDS is a Windows-based environment for hobbyist, academic and commercial developers to create robotics applications for a variety of hardware platforms. RDS allows non-programmers to create robot applications using a visual programming environment and then simulate their robot in three dimensional physics-based environments.
RDS includes a .NET-based RESTful runtime consisting of two components: Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) and Decentralized Software Services (DSS). With RDS, robotics applications can be developed in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio Express using C# or VB.NET, as well as scripting languages such as Microsoft Iron Python.
Highlights from the release notes:
- New Samples and Tutorials
- Simulation on 64-bit Machines through MS Windows-32-on-Windows-64
- Integrated Visual Studio project wizards and templates
- Much Faster DSS Proxy Generation
- Embedded Visual Simulation Environment
It is also important to note that the licensing options have changed. The previous commercial and noncommercial licenses have been replaced with three options:
a Standard Edition for professional developers, an Academic Edition for students and educational researchers, and an Express Edition for hobbyists and casual users. Each license of the new Standard and Academic editions permits the user to distribute an unlimited number of copies of the CCR and DSS run-times.