News

Microsoft Working To Bring Robot OS to Windows Platform

• By Kurt Mackie
• October 01, 2018

Microsoft last week announced its plan to bring the Linux-based Robot Operating System (ROS) to Windows.

The company has just released an experimental version of the Windows OS, dubbed ROS1, that's based on the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise edition. Its release coincided with Microsoft's presence at the ROSCon 2018 event last week.

Microsoft has also joined the open source ROS Industrial Consortium and is working with the Open Robotics organization with a focus on industrial robotics systems.

Microsoft is promising to support Windows ROS with Visual Studio integrated development environment tooling. It's also adding connections to various Azure services, including Cognitive Services, Machine Learning and IoT. In particular, it's integrating ROS with Azure IoT Hub, which is used for the remote management of systems.

Here's how Microsoft's announcement described that effort:

Microsoft is also showcasing a ROS simulation environment running in Azure. It demonstrates a swarm of robots running in a virtual world connected to an orchestration system and controlled via Azure IoT Hub.

At ROSCon 2018, Microsoft demonstrated a Robotis TurtleBot 3 running the ROS Melodic Morenia version, which is based on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. It's a small demo robot on wheels that used Intel's Next Unit of Computing small form factor PC with an Intel Coffee Lake processor.

Melodic Morenia is the 12th ROC release, but it's previously been based on Linux OSes, such as Ubuntu Artful and Bionic, as well as Debian Stretch.

Microsoft is planning to "host the Windows build for ROS1 and shortly ROS2," along with documentation, according to the announcement, although the timing wasn't described. Windows ROS is a Microsoft Azure DevOps project.