Boston Engineering has created FlexStack.
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.
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News, videos, reviews and commentary from my world of Virtual Instrumentation.
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.
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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:
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I was the first to mentioned in a previous post about the great NXT website called nxtprograms.com. One distinct feature of the site is the crystal clear photos of the robots. Well, you too can take great photos of your own creations. The creator of the site has put up some tutorials on how to take photos just like the ones on the site.
Website: How to Take Good Photos of LEGOs
NXT-G Online is software that allows you to program a virtual Lego Mindstorms NXT. Are you a school that doesn’t have enough cash for an NXT hardware set. No fear, this virtual software actually lets you program in NXT-G and download to a virtual NXT brain. Then you can execute the code and see it in virtual action.
To help better understand what is going on in the video, here is the sequence of chronologically events:
- A challenge was selected - a video that came up introduced the challenge.
- The simulated NXT-G programming environment was opened
- Wrote some code (4 motor blocks were dragged onto the palette, and each was set at a different power level).
- Downloaded the NXT-G program to the virtual NXT robot, which automatically opened the virtual environment.
- The robot was moved to where we wanted it to start.
- The virtual NXT brick was opened and we ran the program that was just created. The robot moved accordingly.
Note that the release version of NXT-G Online also has the ability select different sensors and motors for the virtual robot after which you can go back and change your code to make use of your modifications.
At the end of the video, Maria talks a little about here background and the K10 robotics platform which NASA used in the Canadian Arctic recently. The robots, K10 Black and K10 Red, carried 3-D laser scanners and ground-penetrating radar. The two NASA robots surveyed a rocky, isolated polar desert within a crater in the Arctic Circle. The study helped scientists learn how robots could evaluate potential outposts on the moon or Mars.
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Galileo is the innovator of a unique breakthrough technology, The Galileo Wheel which combines wheel and track in a single component. The simple mechanism enables switching back and forth between the two modes within seconds. The technology enables the device to use wheels whenever possible, and tracks whenever needed.
They are currently looking for partners to adapt their invention to the consumer robotics market after successfully landing a contract with an Israeli defense contractor.
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Braintech demonstrates Volts-IQ to VI Shots.
Braintech’s VOLTS-IQ Visual Intelligence Software Suite provides feature recognition, object localization and robot guidance in the form of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) services.
VOLTS-IQ uniquely combines Braintech’s proven robot vision expertise with Microsoft’s powerful MSRS service-based architecture. Using VOLTS-IQ, researchers, commercial product developers and hobbyists can “vision-enable” their robotic projects and products with unprecedented ease and speed, leap frogging the traditional barriers involved with vision development and bringing their ideas to life faster than ever.
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