Free microsoft software for ieee members

Additional terms Terms of transaction. Seizure warnings Photosensitive seizure warning. Report this product Report this app to Microsoft Thanks for reporting your concern.

Our team will review it and, if necessary, take action. Sign in to report this app to Microsoft. Report this app to Microsoft. Report this app to Microsoft Potential violation Offensive content Child exploitation Malware or virus Privacy concerns Misleading app Poor performance.

How you found the violation and any other useful info. Submit Cancel. Open in new tab. Sign me up Stay informed about special deals, the latest products, events, and more from Microsoft Store.

Sign up. The company estimates it has about 60, active users. Those are respectable numbers but they didn't help Microsoft fulfill its goal of kick-starting a vast and lucrative robotics development ecosystem -- like MS-DOS and Windows did for the PC. So over the past two years the robotics group, which is part of of an elite software division called Startup Business Group led by Amit Mital, who reports to Craig Mundie, set about devising a plan to expand Microsoft's stake in robotics.

Bruyninckx, an advocate of free and open source software who started OROCOS, or Open Robot Control Software, a framework for robot control, says that making RDS free is not a change in strategy and nobody he knows in the robotics community is "talking about RDS, let alone using or planning to use it.

Papaefstathiou says that in addition to creating a single RDS release, Microsoft is also making the source code of selected program samples and other modules available online , hoping to improve collaboration among users. In particular, the group wants to entice the growing community of hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and weekend robot builders.

He also says there will be closer collaboration with other projects at Microsoft. He mentions Project Natal , a motion tracking user interface that Microsoft is creating for the Xbox He says Natal's ability to track gestures could "be available also in solutions where human-robot interaction becomes important.

RDS is not a robot operating system -- it's a comprehensive set of development tools, samples, and tutorials. These are great robot platforms but by no means the only ones. In fact, many budding roboticists today are using Arduinos and programming ATmega microcontrollers to build innovative robots.

Why would they need RDS? Microsoft has plenty of competition as well. One platform that is rapidly gaining adoption and has shown impressive results is the Robot Operating System , or ROS, a broad set of open source tools by Silicon Valley robotics firm Willow Garage. Papaefstathiou acknowledges that there are alternative software packages that can do some of the things -- visual programming and simulation, for example -- that RDS does, but he insists that "there's no single competitor for the overall toolset that we have.

As for Willow Garage, Papaefstathiou says they're "targeting different platforms and different capabilities," adding that some of the robots they're using are half million dollar systems. It's only through open source that we can reach this level of adoption and community involvement.

National Instruments, for its part, welcomes Microsoft's move. Lowering the software barriers will make it easy to get into robotics. Microsoft established the robotics group in under the leadership of Tandy Trower, a software veteran who'd headed some of Microsoft's largest and most successful businesses, eventually becoming a minister-without-portfolio reporting directly to Bill Gates.

Trower and Gates believed the consumer market was the right place for the next biggest innovation in robotics, finding parallels with the beginnings of the PC industry, a view Gates described in a now-famous Scientific American article , "A Robot in Every Home. But things changed late last year when Trower left Microsoft to start a healthcare robotics company.

The company chose Papaefstathiou, an unashamed Trekkie -- "Data is very inspirational" -- with a background in high-performance computing, as the robotics group's new leader.

It's up to him now to turn Gates' a-robot-in-very-home vision into reality. I do see potential for a big expansion of RDS. But my impression is that it will be strongest among schools and universities. Now any engineering school in, say, Brazil, Russia, India or China, could use it and have students programming robots, or at least simulating them.

The question is, Will promising, cool robotics products for the consumer market emerge from a larger RDS community? I asked Papaefstathiou what kinds of commercial robots he envisions would be around.

He wouldn't give me specific examples, preferring to say it was up to "the community to think broader about the scenarios.

Blog Post: Just pick how you want it set up and the tables move themselves into position. Blog Post: The robotics company has announced the 11 institutions in the U. RoMan, the Army Research Laboratory's robotic manipulator, considers the best way to grasp and move a tree branch at the Adelphi Laboratory Center, in Maryland. It's not the size of the branch that makes me nervous—it's that the robot is operating autonomously, and that while I know what it's supposed to do, I'm not entirely sure what it will do.

If everything works the way the roboticists at the U. These folks know what they're doing, but I've spent enough time around robots that I take a small step backwards anyway. The robot, named RoMan, for Robotic Manipulator , is about the size of a large lawn mower, with a tracked base that helps it handle most kinds of terrain.

At the front, it has a squat torso equipped with cameras and depth sensors, as well as a pair of arms that were harvested from a prototype disaster-response robot originally developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a DARPA robotics competition.

RoMan's job today is roadway clearing, a multistep task that ARL wants the robot to complete as autonomously as possible. Instead of instructing the robot to grasp specific objects in specific ways and move them to specific places, the operators tell RoMan to "go clear a path. The ability to make decisions autonomously is not just what makes robots useful, it's what makes robots robots.

We value robots for their ability to sense what's going on around them, make decisions based on that information, and then take useful actions without our input. In the past, robotic decision making followed highly structured rules—if you sense this, then do that.

In structured environments like factories, this works well enough. But in chaotic, unfamiliar, or poorly defined settings, reliance on rules makes robots notoriously bad at dealing with anything that could not be precisely predicted and planned for in advance.

RoMan, along with many other robots including home vacuums , drones, and autonomous cars, handles the challenges of semistructured environments through artificial neural networks—a computing approach that loosely mimics the structure of neurons in biological brains. About a decade ago, artificial neural networks began to be applied to a wide variety of semistructured data that had previously been very difficult for computers running rules-based programming generally referred to as symbolic reasoning to interpret.

Rather than recognizing specific data structures, an artificial neural network is able to recognize data patterns, identifying novel data that are similar but not identical to data that the network has encountered before. If you are in one of these fields studying here at QMUL or are simply interested in these areas then you should come and become part of the community. Remember that you will also be a member of the IEEE as a whole too!

By joining, not only will you receive the benefits of the Student Branch here at Queen Mary, but you also enjoy all the additional benefits of being in the IEEE.

Join the Branch Now you are eligible to join us! Enjoy The easiest step of all!