VI Shots

The big announcement this year at the FIRST robotics finals in Atlanta was the new robot controller from National Instruments. This new controller called cRIO runs a real-time OS and can be programmed using LabVIEW. The power of this new technology will open the door for new and more interesting challenges for future FIRST competitions.One area that is underdeveloped in the FRC category of the competition is the autonomous mode. This is in contrast to FLL which is mostly autonomous. Hopefully we will see some interesting games ahead.

In this video VI Shots interviews Ray Almgren who leads the worldwide academic relations program for National Instruments. We also interview several mentors and students to get their feedback on this change in direction for next years competition. Teams 2023, 1739, 47, 107 and 2053 are featured.

We were the first to blog about Slashbot back in March. Now, Slashbot is Internet famous after it was featured on Engadget. It now has 177K+ hits on Youtube. A record for any video featuring LabVIEW or NI technology. I like the fact that it uses solenoids to hit the guitar buttons. This means it could possibly be retrofitted to attach to a humanoid robot that holds the guitar. That would look kinda neat. I contacted Michael Voth and it seems that this demo will be making an appearance at NIWeek 2008. I promise to bring back a video interview of this cool project.

Boston Engineering decided to demonstrate their FlexStack product by attaching it to an iRobot Create programmable robot, have it scan RFID tags and then make it do several dances. FlexStack is powered by LabVIEW Embedded. Take a look at this original VI Shots video.

Roving VI Shots corespondent and LAVA member Justin Goeres participated in the “buy one get one” program that the OLPC foundation announced last year. This is where you spend $400 and you donate one laptop to a child in an impoverished nation and in return you get one laptop for yourself.

I caught up with him and got his feedback on the unit. One thing I learned was that it ships with an application called TurtleDraw. This little app is great for teaching programming in a graphical way. If you’re thinking LabVIEW here, well, take a look and judge for yourself.

Resources:
• Download Video
• OLPC Wiki
• Justin’s LAVA thread on the OLPC

Another video taken at the FIRST final competition of 2008 in Atlanta. NI built a robot called NITRO to demonstrate the powerful capabilities of the new cRIO controller that will be used by the competition teams this year.

In addition to a cool ball shooting mode, NITRO has some advanced image analysis capabilities. Here we see it doing some pattern recognition and executing autonomous moves based on the image viewed.

What is not shown in the video is the ability to execute a specific move just by drawing a series of segmented lines in the provided dashboard application and then transmitting them to the bot. A huge improvement over last year.

The ability of the teams to take advantage of the power of LabVIEW graphical programming is really going to be an asset.

Resources:
• Link to quicktime version of video
• Additional video of NITRO

Watch the video to see how LabVIEW can target several common embedded systems.