The robotics market seems to mirror the PC days of the late 1970s. Everyone was developing with proprietary software on different microprocessor platforms. Then came the IBM PC with Microsoft's DOS (which could just as easily have been Digital Research's C/PM). The rest is history.

With robotics today, the hardware is fragmented, with little standardization. There are lots of companies that want to develop products, but just don't have the tools. Microsoft is hoping that they'll use their Robotics Studio.

Building a robot these days is as much a programming exercise as a nuts-and-bolts hardware project. The problem is that every new robot, even those built by industrial robot manufacturers, requires its own specialized software and programming tools. If there were a single, widely used tool for robot programming, code could be reused on different robots, and robot builders could concentrate on advanced features rather than re-inventing infrastructure.

Microsoft's Robotics Studio runs on Windows XP and includes several components: a programming environment for writing and debugging software that's similar to Visual Studio, the main tool for writing Windows software; a "runtime" environment that functions as a mini-operating system for robots, executing code people write using the programming tool; and a simulator that allows users to build virtual models of robots and test how their software behaves without having to build actual hardware.

If you're into robots, you need to play with (free) Robotics Studio.

• Microsoft's latest - a Windows program for creating robot software
• Robots of the Future
• Scientific American: A Robot in Every Home