Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (Microsoft RDS, MRDS) is a Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation. It is aimed at academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers and handles a wide variety of robot hardware.

RDS is based on CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime), a .NET-based concurrent library implementation, for managing asynchronous, parallel tasks using message-passing and DSS (Decentralized Software Services), a lightweight services-oriented runtime, which allows the orchestration of multiple services to achieve complex behaviors.

Features include: a visual programming tool, Microsoft Visual Programming Language, for creating and debugging robot applications, web-based and windows-based interfaces, 3D simulation (including hardware acceleration), easy access to a robot’s sensors and actuators and support for a number of languages including C# and Visual Basic .NET, JScript, and IronPython.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio includes support for packages to add other services to the suite. Those currently available include Soccer Simulation and Sumo Competition by Microsoft, and a community-developed Maze Simulator, a program to create worlds with walls that can be explored by a virtual robot.