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.
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.
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.
Watch the video to see how LabVIEW can target several common embedded systems.
National Instruments had a booth close to the pits at the 2008 FRC final championship in Atlanta. They built several robots demonstrating the capabilities of the new controller. One of the robots is shown here and the various components of the control hardware are explained.
Resources:
The FlexStack product is a 2.5 inch, rugged platform that takes advantage of the flexibility of LabVIEW Embedded with the power of the Analog Devices Blackfin Processor.
Additional Resources:
Out of the many submissions to the NIWeek 2008 demo contest, this year we have yet another console game meets LabVIEW. Texas A&M students: Dave Buckner, Mitchell Jefferis, Vinny LaPenna, and Michael Voth are working on Slashbot.
To put it simply, we are designing a robot that is capable of autonomously playing a video game, the wildly popular Guitar Hero series. In the game a player attempts to simulate playing songs as color-coded buttons corresponding to notes scroll on the screen. A sensing and computation system will analyze the NTSC video signal as it is output from a PlayStation2 gaming system. The buttons a player is asked to press will be detected and an appropriate control signal will be sent to the robot. The robot will consist of six solenoid actuators, one for each colored button and one for the “strum” bar.
Resources mentioned:
Someone at NI just put up a slew of funny LabVIEW related videos on Youtube. I assume these are interns. Check them out below.
Anybots just released a new video of the next version of Dexter. Dexter is a biped teleoperated robot created by the Mountain View, CA based company.
Here’s a VI Shots video of the Anybots team during last years Robodevelopment conference:
As you know, here at VI Shots we love video. So I’m excited that one of our favorite blogs has started producing a new series of videos focusing on LabVIEW Object-Oriented programming. I’ve embedded the first video above.
Tomi’s done a great job on the graphics, and he cuts from wide to close up shots nicely. [...]
Well, this video could use some editing but here it is. A totally useless application demonstrating the vision capabilities of LabVIEW. Watch a camera mounted on an X-Y motion platform tracking the movements of a goldfish in a fish tank.
I just downloaded the free Spore creature creator. I created my first creature, took some photos of it and even uploaded a video to Youtube directly from the software. All of the above in just half an hour of playing with it. It’s pretty slick.
I gotta hand it to the creators for coming up with [...]
Describes the Mars Rover Exhibit Project made by students in the EPICS program at Purdue University and powered by LabVIEW.
I always do what Google tells me to do. A few weeks ago my Google reader suggested that I should follow the robotgrrl blog RSS feed. So I did. This blog is about robotics from a Montreal, Canada High School girls point of view. Erin loves robots. So much so that she applied to the [...]
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 [...]
