Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Systems Integrator Builds Affordable, Flexible Mobile Robot
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Robotics
Customer Profile
CoroWare, based in Bellevue, Washington, is a solutions and systems integration company with several specialty areas, including robotics.
Business Situation
CoroWare wanted to quickly build a mobile robot prototype based on a flexible, extensible, and cost-effective platform.
Solution
The company chose Microsoft® Windows® XP Embedded to create its prototype, cutting its development time by about 60 percent over Linux-based development, while offering a compelling product for a wide range of industries.
Benefits
Rapid prototyping due to rich development tools
Easily modified platform is attractive to customers
Management features help to integrate robots into enterprise / “If we had been using Linux, it would have taken between double and triple that amount of time to create the prototype.”
David Hyams, Chief Technology Officer, CoroWare
CoroWare provides solutions and systems integration and offers a number of specialty areas, including robotics. When CoroWare executives saw the market potential for affordable mobile robots based on standardized components, they needed to move fast to get a working prototype to an industry trade show. The company chose Microsoft® Windows® XP Embedded over Linux to build the prototype, cutting development time by 60 percent or more over Linux-based development while offering customers a standardized, cost-effective, and highly extensible mobile robotics platform that can be customized for an array of businesses.
Situation
CoroWare is a solutions and systems integration company with a breadth of expertise in various computing platforms. The Bellevue, Washington-based company offers services in a number of specialized areas, including integration of heterogeneous computing systems; the design and development of embedded systems and applications; and robotics integration for industrial use.
Early in 2004 CoroWare management spotted an opportunity in the robotics market, and needed to prepare a prototype quickly to demonstrate at a fall 2004 industry trade show to generate interest and potential customers.
The use of robotics in various commercial industries today is usually limited to “fixed” or stationary assets, such as devices used to monitor parking lots or warehouse floors in commercial buildings. While mobile robotic solutions exist, they are typically built on proprietary solutions that are expensive to buy, difficult to manage and upgrade, and usually lack an easy way to add peripherals.
Lloyd Spencer, President and Chief Executive Officer of CoroWare, says his company wanted to create a more compelling alternative that would open the market to widespread commercial use of mobile robotics in areas such as building security and real estate.
To present an all-new, viable prototype to the market, CoroWare sought a platform that could provide several benefits. First, it needed rapid development capabilities that would help CoroWare complete a prototype quickly in time for the trade show—and reduce CoroWare’s development costs, resulting in lower cost for customers. The company wanted platform extensibility so the product could easily be modified with upgrades and accept peripherals such as webcams and Wi-Fi adapters. The solution needed to be robust, and it had to provide the type of manageability that enterprise customers expect from their desktop systems. For example, software updates should be simple, inexpensive processes that don’t require a lot of cost or specialized development expertise.
Spencer says many developers in the robotics market typically gravitate towards Linux because the initial download and open-source libraries are free.
“Once they have it, though, they have to solve all the interface and implementation issues,” says Spencer, adding that this creates both cost and complexity through the product life cycle. “It creates all kinds of issues that make the solutions either complex or expensive down the road—or both.”
Solution
CoroWare, which has expertise in midrange Linux and Windows-based systems, decided to employ the Microsoft® Windows® XP Embedded operating system to create a mobile robot prototype that it likens to a “laptop-on-wheels.” The device uses a mini-ITX motherboard, a standard mobile robotics platform from The Machine Lab, and common laptop components such as a webcam and 802.11 adapter.
CoroWare used several development tools for the integration effort, including the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003, Visual C++®, and Visual Basic® development systems and the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool.
Benefits
CoroWare received a number of benefits by working with Windows XP Embedded. It was able to rapidly create and build the prototype in time for the trade show. The Windows XP Embedded operating system provides a highly extensible foundation for modifying the system with upgrades and peripherals, offering the ability to easily customize it for particular customer needs. And because the solution uses many readily available, off-the-shelf components, it is both manageable for enterprises and affordable—meaning that companies can purchase the robots in bulk, if necessary, without running up large expenses, and they can manage the robots just as they would other Windows-based devices.
Rapidly Building Prototype
David Hyams, CoroWare Chief Technology Officer, says the robotics market resembles the computer era before the PC marketplace standardized most of the components.
“The products in this market—and most of what was shown at this trade show—are built on proprietary systems with little standardization,” says Hyams. “As far as we could tell, ours was the only product at the show that used a standardized platform where someone could easily add applications and peripherals and share the technology with others.”
Hyams says that by using Windows XP Embedded, CoroWare developers were able to develop prototype software for its device in two weeks, and following that, a functioning prototype machine was built in two months.
“Windows XP Embedded uses standard Windows-based development tools, so we were able to create features in the same way as designing them for a desktop PC. Plus, we could take advantage of the Windows libraries to solve issues in very standard ways that got development tasks done quickly,” Hyams says. “If we had been using Linux, it would have taken between double and triple that amount of time to create the prototype.”
He also says that CoroWare had a lot of confidence that the resulting product would work well because, unlike open-source programming, the Windows operating system provides tested, well managed code.
“When we use the Windows operating system, we know that there are tens of thousands of hours that have already gone into testing the code,” Hyams says. “If we had used Linux, we would have had to test all of our choices to ensure that we were within the bounds of acceptable performance. By choosing Windows XP Embedded, we knew the testing had been addressed by the Windows community. That meant we could focus more on the features of the product, instead of just getting it to the point where it would work. This really accelerated our development time. ”
Easy to Modify System
One of CoroWare’s key business strategies is to make a highly flexible and extensible product that will appeal across any number of industries that might take advantage of mobile robotics. Some of the possible uses, Spencer says, includes security at large industrial plants to augment human patrols; mobile units that can move around real estate properties to take pictures at different times of the day; and “pick-and-place” units in warehouses that can be used to fulfill orders from a retail operation. All of these uses—plus more—may have a basic configuration, but individual customers will likely request changes to the platform as needs arise.
That’s where the flexibility and extensibility of the Windows operating system comes into play, Hyams says.
“It can take weeks or months to replace and retrain employees in many operations, whereas a robot can be reprogrammed in a few hours—or less,” says Hyams. “Robots are also faster at certain tasks. They can read hundreds of bar codes in the time it takes a human to read a dozen.
“To reach all of these potential customers,” Hyams continues, “we needed the kind of flexibility in the operating system that could be easily adapted to specific functions. With proprietary or Linux-based embedded systems, a vendor—and the vendor's customers—will probably be limited to, for example, using a specific camera that will match the interface on the device. With the Windows operating environment, we can add literally thousands of tested interfaces and peripherals that will work the first time they are plugged in. This makes our product more compelling for potential customers.”
Affordable and Manageable for Enterprise Customers
Another factor that influences wider adoption of robotics across industries is for vendors to utilize devices that are useful, dependable, and cost-effective. Spencer says the CoroWare prototype demonstrated the first two benefits, and that end-user customers will find that Windows-based robots are cost-effective as well.
“For something like a mobile robot to be sustainable, it has to be affordable from an operational standpoint,” Spencer says. “If a platform is problematic—if a company has to constantly send people to fix it—then they are not going to readily adopt it. For every capital investment, the initial cost is usually just a fraction of the total cost for the lifetime of the investment, but then you spend several times that amount on maintaining it. This is what happens with Linux—customers spend a lot of time and money getting the parts and the support they need just to keep a machine running.”
On the other hand, Spencer says, incorporating a Windows-based robot into an enterprise means that customers can take advantage of the standardization of parts, expertise, and the management tools that work the same on Windows XP Embedded as they do on desktop and network operating systems that run on Windows.
“For example, our customers can use zero-touch deployment and provisioning to quickly dispatch a fleet of robots for a specific task. They can use Microsoft Active Directory® service [found in the Microsoft Windows Server™ operating system, which is part of the Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software] to group robots into different roles or lock down specific robots for authorized users only, and use [Microsoft] Systems Management Server for the management of software updates,” Spencer says. “And with hardware, Windows has an incredible variety of tools that can be used for memory diagnostics, event traps, and other features that make it easy for an enterprise to manage our mobile robot, just as with any other Windows-based piece of hardware.”
Spencer says that by building a Windows-based robot, CoroWare “plays into the strength of the Windows operating system.”
“We can easily visualize ways for robots operating on Windows XP Embedded to store data from [Microsoft] SQL Server™, or use [Microsoft] BizTalk®Server to add robots to different workflow systems,” he says. “Customers can now have a flexible and affordable alternative for robotics that can merge into existing business operations and play a meaningful role in business.”