Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 available for download

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4

Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 4 is a freely available .NET-based programming environment for building robotics applications. It can be used by both professional and non-professional developers as well as hobbyists.

Version: 4.0.261.0 
Date Published: 3/6/2012

Language:English

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4.exe, 289.6 MB

Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 4 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. This release is an update that has the functionality of the previous RDS 2008 R3 Standard Edition with the addition of support for the Kinect sensor and a defined Reference Platform, also referred to as MARK (Mobile Autonomous Robot using Kinect). 
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio can support a broad set of robotics platforms by either running directly on the platform (if it has an embedded PC running Windows) or controlling the robot from a Windows PC through a communication channel such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®.

In addition to providing support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 provides a Visual Programming Language (VPL) which allows developers to create applications simply by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas and wiring them together.

The powerful Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) provides a high-fidelity simulation environment powered by NVIDIA™ PhysX™ engine for running game-quality 3D simulations with real-world physics interactions.

To help developers getting started, Robotics Developer Studio contains extensive Documentationand a large set of samples and tutorials that illustrate how to write applications ranging from simple "Hello Robot" to complex applications that simultaneously run on multiple robots.

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Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 

"excitement with Microsoft Kinect within the robotics space signaling the potential opportunities that exist in transforming robots to low-cost mainstream consumer devices. RDS 4, with support from the Kinect sensor, aims to make it easier for developers to build applications, including those directed at personal robotics and consumer scenarios, both in hardware and in simulation.

• With RDS 4 simulation tools, you don’t need physical hardware to develop a Kinect-based robot!
• For hardware design, Microsoft has published the Robotics Developer Studio: Reference Platform Design specification for a standardized Kinect-based robot, to work with RDS 4.Parallax, Inc has manufactured a hardware kit based on the reference platform design specification which is available now.
• RDS 4 also adds support for Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0, XNA 4.0, and Silverlight 4.0.
• Developers can use the tool to build commercial products based on the RDS 4 platform.

Here is an example of what can be done with RDS 4:

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Robot's! Kinect! Free Development Environment!

Yeah, I know I've most of that before, but come-on! Robots! Kinect!... :)