Developing Service Robots—For Transport, Cleaning, Healthcare Markets

A robot in every home—or a ‘robuter,’ as Robosoft calls them. Someday soon, this may become reality if Robosoft’s President and Founder Vincent Dupourqué gets his way. Since 1985, Robosoft has been providing advanced robotics solutions for transport, cleaning, security, healthcare, and research markets. The company is considered a European leader in service robotics, and is one of the first spin-offs of INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. ‘Robuters’ have applications in such areas as entertainment, education, culture, healthcare, assistance to the elderly and handicapped people, and more. And to bring these applications to life, Robosoft already integrates 80 percent of the software complexity in its robuBOX, a software module developed with Microsoft Robotics Studio.

By using Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft Robotics Studio, Robosoft was able to create robuBOX in less than a year. RobuBOX is a complete set of hardware, software, and sensors that enable a range of robot controllers from performing simple, low-level functions to a sophisticated fleet of service robots. This is a hardware level abstraction allowing software applications to run on different platforms, just like the BIOS in early PCs.

According to Vincent Dupourqué, in the 1960s, robotics technology became a mainstay of manufacturing floors, and now it is coming of age in the services area. “Imagine robots cleaning floors in malls, transporting people in theme parks, or washing skyscraper windows and more. Our big challenge is to put our robotic engine inside every robot—and to sell our engines to the people making the robots."

And by robotic engine, the company means software—that is the main value, which is what led the company to Microsoft.

The Microsoft Connection?

In 2005, the company decided to use Microsoft tools—with the original idea to make roboticized PCs. Says Dupourqué, “We decided to switch from purely robotic tools to PC software tools and we chose Microsoft technology to do that.” To investigate Microsoft’s technology in this area, Dupourqué did a Google search on Microsoft Robotics, and a speech by Tandy Trower, now the General Manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group came up. He immediately emailed him to tell him what Robosoft was working on—that original email spawned a flurry of other emails and meetings with people in the UK and France. Once the Microsoft France IDEES program met with Dupourqué, they suggested that Robosoft become a beta tester on the first release of the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Explains Dupourqué, “Before I had this tool, I had to spend too much time and money on software development kits. Now that I have this product available, I can focus on robotic software and develop the robots very quickly.”

At the RoboBusiness Conference in June 2006, Robosoft showed off its six-wheeled robuROC6 robot, capable of autonomous navigation across difficult terrain, which highlighted how a distributed architecture, built from its robuBOX robotics core, could be easily controlled via the Microsoft Robotics Studio runtime.

During the last two years Robosoft and Microsoft have focused primarily on technical exchanges—since the market for robotics is still small and in its infancy. Says Dupourqué, “We are building relationships for the future, and have been working with the development team in Redmond, using their software, giving them feedback, asking for improvements on the software development kits.”

Where are they now?

The company’s big achievement is its ability to make robots much faster, and less expensively, than ever before. Just last week, the firm delivered three huge robots (weighing in at more than five tons) for transporting people in a theme park in France, and it has also developed a robot that is now cleaning the glass Pyramid at the Louvre Museum. As another example, Orange, a major global network operator, is using Robosoft technology (the robuLAB equipped with a video camera) to give its subscribers a novel experience—remote visits to museums. The creation of this unique robotic experience was realized in one month using Microsoft Robotics Studio, which provided a high-end development environment that allows fast, reusable software development. Unlike virtual visits, this is a real visit to a museum over the Internet, from a simple web browser and remotely achieved via a robot acting as an individual’s personal guide.

At Microsoft’s Innovation Day in Brussels in late 2007, the company showed how its service robots could help elderly and handicapped people staying at home. In March 2008, it delivered the first units of a set of 16 robotized machines to the “City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI).”

To date, the company has developed nearly 500 robots for different applications. Its ultimate goal is to get its robot engine into every robot—and to commercially develop a ‘universal robot engine’ with Microsoft. Dupourqué is convinced that the Microsoft Robotics Studio will become a major product, and critical enabler technology.

For more information, visit Robosoft online.