Date: 21/01/2010

New graphical system design software from NI for Robotics control systems

NI has introduced the 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. This new software offers an extensive robotics library with connectivity to standard robotic sensors and actuators, foundational algorithms for intelligent operations, perception and motion functions for robots and autonomous vehicles.

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 reduce development time. In addition, the software includes new robotics IP capable of easy implementation to real-time 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 when combined with NI CompactRIO or NI Single-Board RIO devices, it provides a complete development platform for designing robotic control systems. The reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture incorporates a real-time processor, an FPGA and a wide range of I/O, including analog, digital, motion and communication.

The LabVIEW Robotics 2009 software is suitable for designing and prototyping applications such as autonomous and semiautonomous ground vehicles, robot rescue platforms, personal and service robots, medical robotic devices, academic and research robots, agricultural and mining systems.

"When building a new robot, one must typically start from scratch. With no software standard, there is very little opportunity for code reuse 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. I have spent 15 years trying to come up with the best robotics programming language, and LabVIEW has accomplished that."

For more details visit www.ni.com/robotics