Recently I did the IBM developerWorks article for “Intelligent Agents and the Semantic Web” which used Java (and the JADE library) to build agents (for the non-techies agents are a bit like software versions of robots).
However, I’ve recently re-stumbled across the Microsoft Robotics Development Studio (MRDS), which is free to download and play with!!! Apparently it’s not just good for developing robots (and the simulation of robotics), but can be used for a lot more (see zdnets article on “Why business users should grab a copy of Microsoft’s new robotics toolkit“). Potentially it could be used for web-based agents, particularly intelligent ones!
Trouble is, I haven’t played with it… because it only works on Microsoft Windows!
But there is a however! It has recently been brought up on the Mono forums (see “MS Robotics Runtime Port“) , that people are going to be trying to implement the missing functions found within the MRDS executable (so that it can run on Mono, rather than .Net… therefore making it runnable on Linux or Mac). The guys on the Mono forums have also created a wiki page (see “MRDS on Mono“) in order to stimulate discussion and development.
I really hope to be able to see the Microsoft Robotics Development Studio on Mono soon, particularly if I can hook into it with the Mono versions of Java and Ruby!
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Right, that was a quick post… comment if you have any questions or comments… I’ve got to head off to the University now.
Cheers,
Daniel
