ABSTRACT
Although the number of robotics research teams has been growing rapidly with fruitful results being achieved, the current generation of robots lacks standardized hardware and soware platforms-just as the large-scale computers did back in the 1970s. As the speci-¡cation varies for each type of robot and their installed programs cannot be shared, so- ware components oen have to be written from scratch for the development of new types of robots. It also follows that the knowledge built in the development of a robot cannot be passed on. To reverse this situation, Microso Corporation began research and development on a robot soware platform, and in 2006 the Microso Robotics Developer Studio
(MSRDS) was released. Apart from alleviating the above problems, its aim was to provide a common platform and basic service components to allow every designer with an interest in developing robots to easily program the necessary procedures to run robot hardware, without being restricted by the underlying complexity of the hardware system.
