LabVIEW Robotics 2009

[carlitos]

National Instruments has recently released a new version of its graphical system design and programming software. LabVIEW Robotics 2009 is targeted to roboticians who want to infuse their creations with the ability of producing complex behaviour in a friendly and reusable way.

National Instruments - Jan. 11, 2010 – National Instruments today 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. NI LabVIEW Robotics 2009 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 now can implement ideas faster with seamless deployment to real-time embedded and FPGA hardware, and can maximize the software flexibility through integration with a variety of processing platforms, third-party software tools and prebuilt robot platforms.

http://sine.ni.com/images/products/us/starterkit_l.jpg

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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 real-time and embedded hardware for obstacle avoidance, inverse kinematics and search algorithms to help an autonomous system or robot plan an optimal path.

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It was about time Microsoft Robotics Studio had some competition. I really enjoy the fact that LabVIEW is an industry standard in many fields and that it can incorporate code from many sources. Being able to reuse and share code is what pushed today’s software to be what it is (ubiquitous and extremely complex and powerful), I am looking forward to see what it can do to robots.

How do you think the advent of such technology will influence the work of all of us roboticians?

[jbrunet]

We receive many requests from clients asking whether LabView can be used for robotics. It is quite popular in schools around the world. Now an even more powerful tool for robotics!

Some of the products we suggest for LabView users include the entire Phidgets product line, which provide a powerful API.