Software pundits and tech analysts can be forgiven for overlooking Microsoft's new robotics group. Compared with the company's billion-dollar businesses—Windows, MSN, Xbox, and more—robotics is nonexistent. Microsoft is giving the group's software away for free for noncommercial use. In other ways, robotics is merely minuscule. And indeed, the company is hardly betting the farm on it, having devoted only 11 of its 76 000 employees to creating Robotics Studio 1.0.
Yet this tiny group of elite software engineers, housed in a small set of open offices known as the “Broom Closet,” handpicked by a 26-year company veteran who has the ear of Bill Gates, and tucked into a tiny corner of the company's research budget, has put together a set of tools that may bring robot manufacturers under one roof, the way Windows did for most PC makers.
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The tool kit has been downloaded more than 100 000 times since its December release. An enhanced version, previewed in April, will be used this fall in computer-science and engineering classes at Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and other schools. And it's already being tested by a variety of manufacturers, from makers of the tiny iRobot units to Kuka Robot Group, in Augsburg, Germany, which in May released the first robot able to lift 1000 kilograms.