NI pursues robot revolution

National Instruments is moving aggressively to support the “robot revolution” with its announcement of LabView Robotics 2009, which provides a standard development platform for designing robotic and autonomous control systems. With the new release, the company hopes to capitalize on what it forecasts is a burgeoning market for robots, including the fact that one-third of US military vehicles must be autonomous by 2015, representing a $52 billion market. Further, the educational robotics market will reach $1.96 billion by 2014. And, by 2012, service robots for professional use will increase 78 percent, service robots for household use will increase 109 percent, and robots for entertainment and leisure will increase 239 percent.

With LabView for Robots 2009, NI aims to overcome the challenges that currently limit robot usage in our day-to-day lives. Those challenges span software design involving modeling, simulation, and algorithm design; embedded-system design involving analog and digital I/O, protocols, motion control, concurrency, and determinism; and connectivity dealing with actuators, sensors, and motors. The company positions LabView as a key tool in meeting that challenge and has received support for that position from David Barrett, PhD, director of SCOPE (Senior Capstone Program in Engineering) at the Franklin W Olin College of Engineering (Needham, MA) and former vice president of engineering at iRobot. Barrett, who delivered a keynote address at last summer’s NIWeek, said that the robotics industry requires an industrial-grade, hardened, richly supported software-development system, noting that LabView may well fit that description.

The LabView for Robots 2009 release takes aim at making sure LabView fits Barrett’s description, delivering 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. The release ties together LabView’s Real-Time, FPGA, Vision, Control Design and Simulation, SoftMotion, Statechart, and Mathscript RT tools as well as the PID (proportional-integral-derivative) Toolkit. It adds robotics IP (intellectual property) for sensing, connectivity, protocols, path planning, obstacle avoidance, and steering. Target hardware platforms include NI’s CompactRIO, Single-Board RIO, and a new LabView robotics starter kit. NI is collaborating with Cogmation on system simulation, Energid on kinematics, Hokuyo on LIDAR (laser-imaging-detection-and-radar) sensors, iRobot on hardware integration, Microsoft on system simulation, MobileRobots on hardware integration, MaxonMotors on smart-motor connectivity, Pitsco on OEM and academic starter kits, Skilligent on vision software), TORC Technologies on the JAUS (Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems) protocol, and Velodyne on LIDAR sensors.

National Instruments
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NI offers a robotics starter kit that includes the DaNI robot and a robotics-software bundle.