Robotic development environments are a key technology for enabling the rapid advancement of the state of robotics. This paper compares two prominent robotic development environments to examine the limitations in the current state of the art. The first is Player/Stage/Gazebo which is a well established open source project. The second is Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, a fairly new offering from a major player in the software industry. The comparison was done in two ways: 1) by examining the documented features and 2) examining usability experience gained while implementing two common mobile autonomous robotic tasks, wandering and foraging. The tasks were executed in simulation and on a 914 PC-BOT from White Box Robotics. Quantitative results were generated using a set of well defined feature and usability criteria. These results were then further analyzed by a qualitative analysis of the entire process it took to implement both tasks.
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