Microsoft Robotics Group has released the October 2006 Community Technical Preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Robotics Studio. This version can be downloaded from this link.

For those of you who don't know what Robotics Studio is, let me quote Microsoft: The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. Key features and benefits of the Microsoft Robotics Studio environment include: end-to-end Robotics Development Platform , lightweight services-oriented runtime, and a scalable and extensible platform.  

I downloaded the October 2006 CTP some days ago and I have been playing around with the improved simulation engine.  It goes smooth in a normal PC running Windows XP using a mid-range graphics card. Having a few (relatively simple) objects in the simulated world I see no need for the specific AGEIA hardware accelerator board. It is also true that I didn't manage to get it working properly with the more complex simulated worlds (maybe due to some missconfiguration).

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Microsoft Robotics Group has released the November 2006 Community Technical Preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Robotics Studio. This version can be downloaded from this link.

As announced last November 7th Microsoft has released the November 2006 CTP version of MSRS. 

See below to learn what's new in MSRS November 2006 CTP.

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In the context of evolutionary computing it is very interesting to know that from October 2006 the Universoty of Cambridge offers the complete work of Charles Darwin online at darwin-online.org.uk.

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As reported last week in Science, a team of researchers in Cambridge have demonstrated that a patient in vegetative state preserved conscious awareness. Using a fMRI scanner the patient showed same activation patterns as healthy volunteers when she was asked to imagine playing tennis. Dr. Adrian Owen, the leader of this research, claim that the vegetative diagnosed brain was able to understand the meaning of sentences and respond consciously. For a detailed description of the research visit the Medical Research Council website. This specific research work is published in Science, 8th September 2006 under the title Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State.

If these research conclusions are confirmed, it means that current techniques to assess the level of consciousness of humans are not fully valid. One might be unable to move or speak, however that does not neccesarily means that the subject is unable to experience some level of consciousness.

Taking this idea about consciousness level assesment to the field of machine consciousness, one could think about the best way to determine the level of awareness of a robot. Obviously, the first reference is always the Turing test. However, as demonstrated in humans, a purely external evaluation could not be valid in terms of assessing the real level of consciousness of an artificial entity. Anyway, from a strictly engineering point of view this question is irrelevant.

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