At ROSCon 2018 in Madrid this weekend, Microsoft showed up with a small booth and a TurtleBot 3. The TurtleBot wasn’t doing much, just sitting on a table, but it was sitting on the table while running ROS Melodic Morenia on Windows 10. Were it released onto the floor, it would have used its lidar to locate people and drive towards them, as a proof of concept that Microsoft has successfully gotten ROS to work in Windows.

This isn’t just an isolated demo, either. In a blog post, Lou Amadio (Windows IoT principal software engineer at Microsoft), says that “Microsoft is working with Open Robotics and the ROS Industrial Consortium to bring the Robot Operating System to Windows.” Hooray!