National Instruments CompactRIO and Single-Board RIO hardware devices

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

With this platform, CompactRIO is said to be one of the only programmable automation controllers to perform vision tasks.

With the addition of machine vision, engineers can use CompactRIO and Single-Board RIO devices in a variety of measurement and control applications.

It is suitable for autonomous and semi-autonomous robotics applications for obstacle avoidance, pattern recognition and simultaneous localisation and mapping, where control and vision functionality are required.

Industrial surveillance applications served include both machine condition monitoring and critical vessel monitoring, when connectivity to infrared cameras is vital.

The real-time OS and integrated FPGAs ease the process of FDA validation for embedded medical devices.

Machine vision systems consist of two parts - image acquisition and image processing. To acquire images, software has expanded to support internet protocol (IP) cameras. In addition to native IP camera support, the company’s alliance partner moviMED has released the AF-1501 analog frame grabber for C series products that can acquire monochrome images.

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