I wonder how expensive and easy it would be to buy a Windows Mobile device that has a camera and hook it to a robot chassis and drive it using a wireless controller and roam through the house videoing.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/default.aspx

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=9312A198-E7F2-99DF-31DA639D6C4BA567

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb648757.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb648761.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb483096.aspx

I was all hyped up and this must have effected others as well, because I received this from a friend:

I just read an article in IEEE Spectrum on MS's robotics toolkit.  I thought this interesting since it has a visual programming language to drive the robots (I've seen similar before…) and I thought it might be useful to look at how this handles calculations/decisions processing.

Well during the install…this occurred.

Installer wanted to installed .net 2.0 … go ahead, I know I'm bit out of date (don't worry I have my JDK updated!)

Now install DirectX 9 … hmmm why for a 2d application…oh well.

Now install DirectX SDK and download every update since 2005  … Finally I can work on my Doom clone for ROBOTS.

Now install .Net 3.0 framework … Hmmm…why didn't you do that in the first place!

Now installed core robotics package … go ahead, finally.  I'm not sure I like robots anymore.