This morning I noticed that Microsoft announced the availability of their Robotics Studio, on their website. I’m not the biggest MS fan around, but I was messing around with earlier beta versions and I liked what I saw. Actually it’s visual programming language tool looks very similar LabVIEW, which is what the software that ships with the LEGO Mindstorms NXT. So much so that I wonder if it’s just licensed technology from National Instruments. In any case it’s not that important, and the nice thing about the MS tool is that it has nice out of the box support for some of the more currently hip robots (Minstorms NXT, and the Roomba), and some basic tutorials.
I’ve been on a bit of a robotics kick in the past year. I jumped all over the Mindstorm NXT when it was announced and pre-ordered several months in advance. In fact when I heard about it I was in the process of hunting for the RIS (RCX) kit since they were no longer made and you mainly had to search around on eBay for one. I’d wanted the RCX kit since it was announced but just simply didn’t have the money for it at the time (and I wasn’t as interested as much as I am now). On a side note, I recently found an RIS kit in a small nearby shop, so I’ll probably go pick that up sometime soon (assuming nobody else takes it). Lately since the NXT announcement there seems to be quite a bit attention being focussed on robots. Actually this is something that’s been slowly building. Obviously Honda and Sony had gotten a lot of attention in the past few years with their respective projects and products, but it seems there’s been a lot more attention in the news lately, particularly with Mindstorms (and similar hobby kits), as well as iRobot’s products.
However…. There is one series of robots, I’m sad to see not listed or supported or even mentioned at all with Microsoft’s latest release. My beloved little AIBO. Sony’s poor little (sadly discontinued) robot dog seems to be neglected in all this, yet was probably the big catalyst (IMO) for starting all this home robotics noise (if you wanna call it a craze). After all, I think it’s still one of the coolest robots to have. Not only that, but there’s a quite a bit of independent community around them, and they’re actually quite programmable with the AIBO SDE along with other tools like URBI, Tekkotsu, Pyro, and Cognitive Vision. Actually there’s quite a bit of stuff being done out there with AIBOs, however it just seems a bit sad that they’re not included in all this MS Robotics studio love. Granted they’re hard to come by now, and not exactly cheap (in fact some are going on eBay for more than what they originally sold for). I sorta wonder if Sony had released (say the last ERS-7M3 model) today if it would’ve gotten a lot more attention than it did back when the first ERS-110s came out (seemingly dismissed as expensive toys for the rich, ( in spite of the pretty good sales in Japan)). That all being said, I will continue on my quest to acquire an ERS-7M3 (preferably the champagne one) before they all run out. Even though Howard Stringer probably doesn’t see much point to continuing or restarting Sony’s robotics projects (not exactly a profitable group), I certainly would love to see the comeback of the AIBO…
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