Date: 18/02/2010

NI adds vision capabilities to its hardware devices

National Instruments has added machine vision capabilities to NI CompactRIO and NI Single-Board RIO hardware devices that provide an integrated measurement and control platform for industrial and embedded systems.

This integrated platform solution is suitable for autonomous and semi-autonomous robotics applications for obstacle avoidance, pattern recognition and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), where advanced control and vision functionality are required. Industrial surveillance applications serve both machine condition monitoring and critical vessel monitoring, when connectivity to infrared cameras is vital. Finally, the real-time OS and integrated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) used with both CompactRIO and NI Single-Board RIO eases the process of FDA validation for embedded medical devices.

NI claims, with this integrated platform solution, CompactRIO becomes one of the only programmable automation controllers (PACs) on the market to perform vision tasks, providing a more efficient, all-in-one design with a small physical footprint and less system complexity.

To process images, engineers now can program and deploy image processing libraries to CompactRIO and NI Single-Board RIO deployment targets with NI LabVIEW 2009 graphical system design using the NI Vision Development Module 2009 software, which contains hundreds of image processing and machine vision functions.

NI says that Engineers can add vision capabilities to the following CompactRIO and NI Single-Board RIO controllers: NI cRIO-901x, NI cRIO-902x and the NI cRIO-907x and NI sbRIO-96xx systems.

"At our Global Technology Development facility, we are always looking to optimize the size, speed and reliability of our manufacturing machines," said Ben Engelen, senior project engineer for vision and measurement at Philips GTD Mechanization. "The CompactRIO platform provides the high-speed determinism we need for efficient and precise component placement. The new MoviMED AF-1501 frame grabber module helps us integrate video feedback into the same platform and fully automate the entire process."


For more details visit www.ni.com