Robots Enter Mainstream Business and Digital Life Applications
White Box Robotics begins shipping .net components for the 9-series robots
The world of robots just got a lot bigger. White Box Robotics today announced availability of the highly anticipated .NET controls for Visual Studio 2005 for the 9-series robot family and in particular for the award winning 914 PC-BOT. This revolutionary release of brand-new, tightly integrated Microsoft Windows .NET PC-BOT controls puts real robotics capability into the hands of the entire Microsoft Windows development community. For the first time, and via non-robotics developers, general service robots such as the 914 PC-BOT can readily be deployed into mainstream legacy systems running business and digital life applications.
At the time of release, there are five PC-BOT components for Visual Studio 2005: Drive, Messages, Sensors, M3 (I/O) and ToolBar. A Visual Studio Developer can drag and drop these components into any Windows forms project. From that point, the Windows developer may write their code and integrate the robot actions, response and movement using any of the .NET supported languages (Visual Basic, C#, J#, C++ and so on).
The recently released and visually stunning 914 PC-BOT is the first general service robot designed for digital life at the point of human contact. This robot is intended to be used as a mobile data, internet and/or communications server and already has software driver support for Linux Player/Stage and the newly launched Microsoft Robotics Studio for the robotics community and particularly as a robotics development platform to serve the robotics education market. The addition of native Windows support and in particular this release of .NET controls means that mainstream Windows developers can now add a general service robot into legacy business, warehousing, distribution and supply chain management applications as well as domestic digital life solutions. The default configuration of the robot comes with enough horsepower to carry a significant amount of data and data processing capability on-board and also has industry standard operating systems loaded and running to act as a host machine – with full mobility and robotic response.
“We think this will spark the addition of robots into everyday life,” said Jeremy James, CEO and President of Frontline Robotics. “Why not deploy a mobile robot with masses of data into busy working environments when it is now so simple to do?” he added. With .NET support, the millions of Microsoft Windows developers working inside legacy applications can now take control of the motors and the vision and sensor systems to safely and simply navigate working environments in industry, commerce and the home. The 914 PC-BOT comes as a working robot made almost entirely out of PC Parts and has full, industry standard operating systems capability on-board. It is in fact, a fully operating high-end PC – but is presented as a robot that has been remarkably well received by end users as well as robotics enthusiasts and educators.
“We are committed to making robots part of mainstream life” said Tom Burick, Founder of White Box Robotics, “the addition of industry standard development tools is inherent to that goal and we plan to move forward in keeping this complex robot as simple as possible for the every-day developer”.
Additional information for buyers and resellers will be made available at the White Box website http://www.whiteboxrobotics.com. Owners of 914 PC-BOTs will be invited to download this new software, which will be made available shortly.
Press/Analyst Contacts
SueHardman
Frontline Robotics
Ottawa, Canada
P: (613) 739-2687 x.3026
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