National Instruments Introduces LabVIEW Robotics 2009 for Designing Robotics Control Systems

By DE Editors

National Instruments’ LabVIEW Robotics 2009 is the newest version of its graphical system design software that provides a standard development platform for designing robotic and autonomous control systems.

NI LabVIEW Robotics 2009 delivers a 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 new software features seamless deployment to real-time embedded and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware and integration with a variety of processing platforms, third-party software tools, and prebuilt robot platforms.

“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,” says 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.”

LabVIEW Robotics 2009 can import code from other languages including C/C++, .m files and VHDL, and communicate with a variety of sensors using built-in drivers for LIDAR, IR, sonar, and GPS devices to reduce development time. In addition, the software includes new robotics IP capable of 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.

When combined with NI CompactRIO or NI Single-Board RIO devices, LabVIEW Robotics 2009 provides a 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.

For more information, visit LabVIEW’s Robotics 2009 site.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.