Graphical System Design Inspires a New Age of Robotics
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Since the first industrial robotic arm became operational at General Motors in 1961, the number of robots has grown to an estimated 4.5 million worldwide, according to The International Federation of Robotics.
Today, robots have become ubiquitous, ranging from commercial robots used in daily life, such as the iRobot Roomba vacuum and LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT, to sophisticated applications, such as telerobotic surgery, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and autonomous vehicles. Competitions hosted by the Google X PRIZE Foundation, the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) organization, RoboCup, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are driving innovation in the field of robotics.
Figure 1. Virginia Tech used graphical system design to rapidly and successfully deploy the DARwIn design.
One example of innovative robotics research is the bipedal humanoid robot developed by Virginia Tech students. The robot is the first U.S. entry in the humanoid division of RoboCup, an international robotic soccer competition created to promote research in robotics, artificial intelligence, and related fields.
Accelerating Robotics Innovation
The bipedal humanoid robot, named Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence (DARwIn), was originally developed to study human locomotion for the research and development of prosthetic limbs by engineering students from the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at Virginia Tech, led by Professor Dennis Hong. Using the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform, DARwIn achieved full range of motion and accurately imitated human movement so effectively that it was quickly modified to enter the RoboCup soccer competition (see Figure 1).
Innovators like the students at RoMeLa are pioneering a leading-edge approach to robotics through graphical system design. With the LabVIEW graphical programming platform, robotics domain experts can design, prototype, and deploy sophisticated robotic designs. These innovators can focus on solving the engineering problems at hand rather than the low-level implementation details.
Traditionally, teams of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and programmers have individually led robotics development due to the depth of vertical knowledge with traditional tools required in each area. LabVIEW and NI hardware provide a uniform and versatile platform that democratizes robotics development by providing a standard set of tools that all robotics engineers can adopt.
Using LabVIEW, RoMeLa students could analyze the dynamic bipedal motion and devise and prototype a robotic control system. Once the prototype performed satisfactorily, they deployed the control algorithm to a PC/104 single-board computer running the LabVIEW Real-Time Module.
A user can integrate an advanced robot without necessarily being a computer scientist or a programmer. For example, one student with very little LabVIEW and vision experience designed an algorithm telling the robot to track a red ball, using its IEEE 1394 camera and the NI Vision Development Module, in a couple of hours. With LabVIEW and NI hardware, engineers can use the same powerful graphical programming language to rapidly design and prototype complex algorithms; deploy the designs to a PC, field-programmable gate array (FPGA), microcontroller, or real-time system; and interface with virtually any sensors or actuators. Now, instead of functioning purely as mechanical engineers, domain experts can function as robotics designers.
Figure 2. LabVIEW provides a uniform, versatile tool for sophisticated robotics design.
Meeting Real-World Challenges with a Standard Robotics Platform
Most robotic systems have four distinct areas of development – sensing and actuation, control design and simulation, embedded controller programming, and network communications. One example is the Spider remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) developed by Nexans, a worldwide leader in cabling systems for oil and gas applications.
Nexans developed the Spider, operated remotely from a ship, to prepare the North Sea floor for a pipeline that extracts natural gas in severe conditions. To counteract disturbances of harsh seas, Nexans designed a sophisticated heave compensation system to dynamically control the cable tension that attaches the ship to the ROV. Three FPGA-based real-time embedded NI CompactRIO systems, programmed with LabVIEW, perform heave compensation, winch, and power control, in addition to communicating with the main LabVIEW human machine interface (HMI) application. Closed-loop control algorithms running in LabVIEW gather in-motion sensor readings to provide corrective responses to the cable tension.
This real-world robotic application demonstrates the scope of the LabVIEW graphical system design platform ranging from control design, 3D visualization, and embedded control to data acquisition and communications.
Figure 3. LabVIEW graphical system design turns today’s children into tomorrow’s innovators.
Today’s Children, Tomorrow’s Edisons
Graphical system design is not only leading the way for current robotics designers. Engineers of tomorrow – the 8-year-olds of today – are getting excited about science, technology, engineering, and math by taking advantage of an easy-to-use graphical system design approach to robotics. LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT demonstrates how robotics encourages innovative thinking. Using the included graphical programming tool based on LabVIEW, thousands of children are building sophisticated robotics designs. They are implementing parallel programming on the embedded ARM7 microcontroller in the NXT that communicates with sensors and actuators. They are, in a sense, the youngest domain experts and innovators in robotics – the new Edisons.
Graphical system design is imperative to continue innovation in robotics design at an accelerated pace. Complicated traditional tools can impede advancements in robotics technology. LabVIEW provides a comprehensive and scalable platform that spans the design, prototype, and deployment phases, so engineers can focus on robotics without getting discouraged by minute implementation details. They can use the same powerful platform to program controllers ranging from microcontrollers to FPGAs; send and receive signals from virtually any sensor and actuator; design and simulate dynamic control systems; and implement an interface to remotely monitor or control the robot. The LabVIEW graphical system design platform encourages accelerated robotics design ingenuity by providing a uniform platform for all robotics designers.
– Anu Saha
Anu Saha is an academic product manager. He holds bachelor’s degrees in computer engineering and electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee.
Watch videos of NI robotics applications.
This article first appeared in the Q1 2008 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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