Robot Experimentation

I believe that robots will increasingly become a part of people's everyday life.  I have been fascinated by robots since 7th grade when I built the robot project in Boys Life Magazine as a science fair project.  Two recent developments have caught my attention in robotics.  First, several months ago iRobot announced the availability a robotic development platform for hobbyests, students, and engineers called iRobot Create.  The platform provides a Roomba like robot without the vacuum that can be programmed, and has been designed to allow for easy incorporation of additional sensors, electronics, and mechanical systems.  The second development, is that Microsoft has created a robotics programming platform called Robotics Studio.  The main premise is that this software provides a layer of abstraction for robot designers in programming the hardware, and also provides for easy communication between robots designed by different teams.  One of Microsoft's goals was to reduce the complexity of implementing a robot platform to nurture cumulative development from one engineering team to the next.  This can be an enabling technology to allow widespread adoption of robots beyond industrial applications.  There was an article in IEEE Spectrum recently that described the Microsoft Robotics Studio development and the development team [1].  The iRobot Create and Microsoft Robotics Studio are two things that I am very interested in experimenting with.

[1] Cherry, Steven. August 2007. "Robots, Incorporated Microsoft's Best and Brightest are Quietyly Trying to Bring Robotics into the Mainstream. " IEEE Spectrum. Vol. 44, No. 8.