National Instruments LabVIEW Robotics 2009 system design software

National Instruments has announced LabVIEW Robotics 2009, the latest version of its graphical system design software for designing robotic and autonomous control systems.

The package 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.

With the software, engineers and scientists now can implement ideas faster with seamless deployment to real-time embedded and field-programmable gate array hardware, and can maximise the software flexibility through integration with a variety of processing platforms, third-party software tools and prebuilt robot platforms.

Because of its open graphical system design platform, the software 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 reduce development time.

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.

The package is suitable for designing and prototyping applications including: autonomous and semiautonomous ground vehicles; robot rescue platforms; personal and service robots; medical robotic devices; academic and research robots; agricultural and mining systems.

When combined with CompactRIO or Single-Board RIO devices, Robotics 2009 provides a development platform for designing robotic control systems. The reconfigurable I/O architecture incorporates a real-time processor, an FPGA and a wide range of I/O, including analog, digital, motion and communication.

A collection of robotics tutorials, webcasts, videos and case studies about using NI hardware and software can be obtained by downloading the Robotics 101 Resource Kit at www.ni.com. For additional information on LabVIEW Robotics 2009, visit www.ni.com/robotics.