Robotic and autonomous control systems

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April 2010 Motion Control & Drives

National Instruments introduces LabVIEW Robotics 2009 for sophisticated robotics control systems.

The new software is ideal for designing, prototyping and deploying autonomous ground robotic systems.

National Instruments has announced LabVIEW Robotics 2009, a new version of its graphical system design software that provides a standard development platform for designing robotic and autonomous control systems. The software delivers an extensive robotics library with connectivity to standard robotic sensors and actuators, foundational algorithms for intelligent operations and perception and motion functions for robots and autonomous vehicles. With this new software, engineers and scientists can now implement ideas faster with seamless deployment to realtime embedded and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware, and can maximise the software flexibility through integration with a variety of processing platforms, third-party software tools and pre-built robot platforms.

“When building a new robot, one must typically start from scratch. With no software standard, there is very little opportunity for code re-use or sharing,” said Dr Dave Barrett, professor at Olin College and former vice president of engineering at iRobot Corporation. “We need an industrial-grade, hardened, richly supported software development system to build autonomous, mobile robots that can sense, think, and act in the world around them.”

Because of its open graphical system design platform, LabVIEW Robotics 2009 can import code from other languages including C/C++, .m files and VHDL, and communicate with a wide variety of sensors using built-in drivers for everything from LIDAR, IR, sonar and GPS devices to dramatically reduce development time allowing engineers and scientists to focus on adding their own algorithms and intelligence. In addition, the software includes new robotics IP capable of easy implementation to realtime and embedded hardware for obstacle avoidance, inverse kinematics and search algorithms to help an autonomous system or robot plan an optimal path.

LabVIEW Robotics 2009 is ideal for designing and prototyping applications including the following:

* Autonomous and semiautonomous ground vehicles.

* Robot rescue platforms.

* Personal and service robots.

* Medical robotic devices.

* Academic and research robots.

* Agricultural and mining systems.

When combined with NI CompactRIO or NI Single-Board RIO devices, LabVIEW Robotics 2009 provides a complete development platform for designing robotic control systems. The reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture incorporates a realtime processor, an FPGA and a wide range of I/O, including analog, digital, motion and communication. By combining off-the-shelf sensors with a CompactRIO or NI Single-Board RIO embedded system, engineers and scientists can rapidly design and prototype complex robotic applications. Engineers and scientists can now design sophisticated control systems and quickly deploy their applications to realtime embedded hardware from a single environment.

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