Microsoft to lead Robot revolution, claims human

SOFTWARE LEVATHAN Microsoft has a cunning plan for when people no longer want its operating systems. It is going into robotics.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, Vole is hoping to standardise robots in the same way it did with operating systems.

Quoting Joe Pinto, robotics industry observer, Vole is one of the few companies which is taking robotics seriously and is also the only one who can give the fledgling industry a boot up the jacksie.

The software maker recently posted its Microsoft Robotics Studio (MRS) online where anyone willing to undertake a 54-megabyte download can have it free of charge. The latest version, posted this month, is 1.5. The beta version appeared last June and version 1.0 was posted in December.

Pinto hopes that it might standardise a fragmented industry. He said that if MRS was more widely adopted a third-party robotics software market could emerge.

He said this was exactly the same state of affairs as the early 1980s, every microcomputer had its own software, but then the PCs standardised on Microsoft DOS software.

He added that Vole's dream is that the robot market will explode like the PC market did, and that people will jump on it and do the DOS thing.

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