Real Robots Part 2: Software

July 17, 2007

This round of reviews takes a look at the software that is available with iRobot Create, the Lego Minstorms NXT and Whitebox Robotic’s 9-series PC-Bot.

William G. Wong

This next article in the series takes a look at the software for the three robotic platforms covered in Real Robots Part 1: The Contenders, focusing on hardware-specific software. Platforms include the iRobot Create, the Lego Minstorms NXT and Whitebox Robotic’s 9-series PC-Bot. Subsequent parts of this series will examine more general robotic frameworks that work with these hardware platforms such as the Microsoft Robotics Studio and open source Player Stage. For example, the Microsoft Robotics Studio supports all three platforms although the level of support and method of implementation varies significantly. More on that in the next article. See the stories here: Commanding The iRobot Create The Mind of Mindstorms PC-Bot With .NET Related Links iRobot Lego Microsoft National Instruments Player Stage sourceforge.net Whitebox Robotics

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.