Robots, Incorporated Continued 2

Photo: Brian Smale

STRAIGHT FROM THE SHOULDER:In 2003, Stewart Tansley told Bill Gates that robotics was the next big thing, especially at universities.

In Mundie's picture of computing's future, processing and information aren't just distributed among the components of a system; they're strewn throughout its environment. Consider the Roomba, iRobot's lowly $119 vacuum-cleaning robot. Today, it employs several strategies to navigate a room in ever-widening circles as it cleans. But most things in the room haven't moved since it vacuumed yesterday, and some things—such as the walls—don't move at all. In the distributed, services-oriented model, some other computer in the household could be a repository of information about the location of walls and furniture and electrical outlets. Any robot moving about the room could draw from that data and update it when, say, a chair gets shifted from one place to another. Access to information about the layout of a house is a service that would be available to every robot. Access to electricity is another.

A small army of Roombas, communicating with one another directly or through a household server, could quickly vacuum an entire house. Eventually, the tables and chairs themselves would be smart enough to report their new locations when they get moved. And new robots coming into the household would quickly acquire whatever information they need, just as servants do when one royal family visits another. In Robotics Studio, such services, whether they reside in another component within the same robot, in a local computer, or across the Internet, show up whenever they're available. Microsoft calls this DSS, for decentralized software services.

CCR and DSS are the two key technologies developed by the Advanced Technology Incubation Group to have ended up in Robotics Studio. Although the main burden of making sure that a robot doesn't get bogged down doing one thing, to the exclusion of other vital tasks, belongs to the operating system, and so‑called real-time operating systems (RTOSs) have been around for decades now, CCR and DSS ensure that the benefits of an RTOS don't get lost at higher levels of programming.

The Studio software hides complexity from programmers in some other ways as well. Services in a program can be displayed as simple block icons, and by connecting them with arrows, programmers create relations between them—such as sending data from one to another. When Trower demonstrates this process on the big television screen, it seems almost too easy. (Programming something that could guide a heart patient down a hospital corridor would be considerably more complicated.) The software tool kit also contains tutorials, sample programs, and generic robotics code, as well as a simulation tool that lets you test your program without having to risk sending an expensive robot down a flight of stairs headfirst.

Robotics Studio is written for Windows, but it doesn't follow that the robot itself is using any form of that operating system. Of course Microsoft would like robot makers to use Windows. But many of the robots in the Broom Closet don't even use a formal operating system.

When Mundie's group wrote a base of code for multiprocessor programming, they didn't have robotics, or anything else, specifically in mind. Mundie simply had assigned several architects to write some general software for concurrent, distributed computing. So he needed someone to figure out what applications could take advantage of the new software. Trower was given that job. He looked for tasks that were highly distributed, requiring a great deal of local autonomy, and used lots of computation in real time. He would eventually find the field of robotics, but not right away.

He first considered biologically inspired technologies, such as neural networks and genetic algorithms, “because they're inherently built on the idea of distributed processing and concurrency,” he says. Mundie's ideas were applicable to it, he says, but biotech was “too immature” for anything that Microsoft could add value to.

After an entire year of searching, Trower was reassigned to Bill Gates's staff. “I went to work for Bill as an extra set of strategic eyes and ears,” he says. “I kind of stumbled upon people from the robotics community who were knocking on our door.” For example, at a meeting with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the head of Lego, maker of the robot toy Mindstorms, told Ballmer, “We ought to do something together.” There was also a visit to the Microsoft campus by Red Whittaker, whose Carnegie Mellon team would soon do better than any other in the first DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition for robotic vehicles that required them to undertake an arduous trek through the desert.

Unknown to Trower, Whittaker was far from the only university professor telling Microsoft about the importance of robotics. The company has an entire group, now known as ER&P, for external research and programs, that, among other things, hires hundreds of computer-science students as interns, funds faculty and graduate student research, and brings several hundred professors from around the world to Redmond every summer for a Faculty Summit, honoring five as New Faculty Fellows, and giving them $200 000 each to spend on their research. Through these various relations, Stewart Tansley, program manager in ER&P, got a clear message from computer-science professors: we want to use robots in our classrooms, but it's too hard. [See photo, “Straight From the Shoulder.”]