Exploring Microsoft Robotics Studio as a Mechanism for Service-Oriented Robotics

When working with mobile robots, a typical task consists in developing simulated tests before going towards the real implementations. Nevertheless, this simulation stage may be very time consuming for setting-up environments and robots. Also, after demonstrating that things worked well in the simulated environment, implementing algorithms in the real robots demands an extra time consuming stage that requires for the programmer to adapt the code for the real connections. Once this is done, the real world problems come to be the core of challenges in the mobile robotics research area. In that way, service-oriented robotics is starting to provide a path for quick simulation and real implementation setups. In this paper, we make use of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MSRDS) and a Mobile Robots Pioneer 3-AT robot for exploring its behavior under different service providers. Experiments are shown for demonstrating simulated and real tests using technologies as: speech recognition, vision, and sensor-based navigation. Also, information about the main functionality of MSRDS, including VPL and SPL, is presented.