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Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 4 is a freely available .NET-based programming environment for building robotics applications. It can be used by both professional and non-professional developers as well as hobbyists.

• Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 4 enables hobbyists and professional or non-professional developers to create robotics applications targeting a wide range of scenarios. This release is an update that has the functionality of the previous RDS 2008 R3 Standard Edition with the addition of support for the Kinect sensor and a defined Reference Platform, also referred to as MARK (Mobile Autonomous Robot using Kinect).
  
  Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio can support a broad set of robotics platforms by either running directly on the platform (if it has an embedded PC running Windows) or controlling the robot from a Windows PC through a communication channel such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®.
  
  In addition to providing support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 provides a Visual Programming Language (VPL) which allows developers to create applications simply by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas and wiring them together.
  
  The powerful Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) provides a high-fidelity simulation environment powered by NVIDIA™ PhysX™ engine for running game-quality 3D simulations with real-world physics interactions.
  
  To help developers getting started, Robotics Developer Studio contains extensive Documentation and a large set of samples and tutorials that illustrate how to write applications ranging from simple "Hello Robot" to complex applications that simultaneously run on multiple robots.

Files

Status: Deleted This download is no longer available on microsoft.com. The downloads below are archives provided by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the Microsoft Download Center prior to August 2020.

File	Size
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4.exe SHA1: 68db5e34f930a57d5710301fb6f0fa8f65b13a0d	287.46 MB

• 
  Robotics Developer Studio requires Windows 7.
  In addition to using Robotics Developer Studio as a stand-alone development environment, it can be used with any of the Visual Studio 2010 Editions, including the Express Edition. Note that you should install Visual Studio before Robotics Developer Studio so that the New Service Wizard installs correctly.
  

• Important: Make sure you have the latest service pack and critical updates for Windows 7. To find recent security updates, visit Windows Update.
  
  1. Install the version of Visual Studio 2010 with C# if you plan to write new services for RDS
  2. Install Kinect for Windows SDK V1
  3. Install Silverlight 4.0 SDK
  4. Click the Download button on this page to start the download
  5. Do one of the following:
     • To start the installation immediately, click Run.
     • To save the download to your computer for installation at a later time, click Save. (Recommended)
     • To cancel the installation, click Cancel.
  6. Answer the prompts. Note that the CCR and DSS Runtime will be installed first as well as some pre-requisites. RDS requires .NET 4.0 but does not install it because this comes with Visual Studio. If you want to remove RDS later, you must also remove the CCR and DSS Runtime afterwards.
  7. When the installation is complete, look in the Start Menu under Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 and run Build All Samples. This is a separate manual step that takes several minutes.