SuperDroid Robots showed off the SD6 robot, a super-rugged, treaded UGV that was developed jointly with NI.

Dr. Hong brought the latest and greatest from RoMeLa, showing off their full-size humanoid robot, CHARLI:

I got a picture with CHARLI and Dr. Hong as well:

You can download many of the presentations from the Robotics Summit from the NIWeek Community:

• Mobile Diagnostic Robot: Sense, Move, and Control
• Ultralean Robotic Solutions
• Controlling a Hyper-Dynamic Quadruped Robotic Platform With LabVIEW and NI Single-Board RIO
• FIRST Robotics Using NI LabVIEW and CompactRIO
• Early Experience Using LabVIEW Robotics With Industrial and Custom Serial-Linked Robots
• The Nitty Gritty Technical Details of the LabVIEW Robotics Module
• Open Control Architecture for an Industrial SCARA Robot
• Medical Simulations With Mechatronic Eyes
•  Fuzzy Logic for Most of Us

And that’s not everything. Check out Brian Powell’s recap of all-things-robotic at NIWeek on the LabVIEW Field Journal blog:

LabVIEW Robotics at NIWeek 2011

Do the screens of any of the monitors look familiar?

Read the news coverage of this robots here:

Micro-machines are go: The U.S. military drones that are so small they even look like insects

This example features sensor fusion, using the Kinect to gather the 3D image of the world and a scanning sonar to help avoid obstacles that get too close for the Kinect to see.

Check out the full recipe on the NI Robotics Code Exchange, including hardware lists, software and setup requirements, as well as code descriptions and downloads.

Download: Using the XBox Kinect with LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit

This one is very similar to John Wu’s LabVIEW + Kinect example I shared awhile back. Karl Muecke, NI R&D engineer, shares his 6D visualization example on the NI Robotics Code Exchange.

You can view a video screen capture of the demo and download his open source code here:

https://decibel.ni.com/content/blogs/MechRobotics/2011/04/19/kinect-6d-visualization-in-labview

Well, when it rains, it pours: More and more LabVIEW developers are uniting, creating and sharing drivers that allow you to communicate with the Xbox Kinect hardware using LabVIEW software.

An NI Community member, anfredres86, has published his VI driver library, making it easy to download and install the necessary files for you to start developing robotics applications in LabVIEW that utilize the Kinect hardware for robot sensing.

Here is a video of the 2D occupancy grid mapping example he put together using LabVIEW and the Kinect:

I encourage everyone to check out (and download) his code:

Kinect Drivers for Labview: http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-15655

And be sure to share your examples on the NI Robotics Code Exchange as well!

Ok, so this week’s post proves that I simply can’t get enough of John Wu’s blog, RIOBotics. John is cranking out LabVIEW code for robotics applications , left and right.

This time, John helps you use LabVIEW to acquire and plot data directly from your iPhone’s accelerometer through UDP. (I bet this is similar to how Waterloo Labs was able to build an iPhone app that allowed them to steer a car by tilting their iPhone from side to side.)

Visit John’s blog to download his code.

Ryan Gordon, from http://ryangordon.net/, got things started by building and sharing a LabVIEW wrapper for the OpenKinect library. Then John Wu, another LabVIEW programmer, took things one step further building an example VI for 3D scene construction using the Kinect sensor and point clouds.

Download John’s example on his blog post: LabVIEW, Xbox Kinect, and 3D point cloud visualization

Thank you John and Ryan! This is the beginning of some incredible and exciting work!

By now, you’ve all heard of one of DARPA’s latest robotics projects, but just in case:

http://www.thearmrobot.com/

DARPA is introducing its Autonomous Robotic Manipulation  (ARM) program. The goal of this 4 year, multi-track program is to  develop software and hardware that allows an operator to control a robot  which is able to autonomously manipulate, grasp and perform complicated tasks,  given only high-level direction. Over the course of the program in the  Software Track, funded performers will be developing algorithms that  enables the DARPA robot to execute these numerous tasks. DARPA is also  making an identical robot available for public use, allowing anyone the  opportunity to write software, test it in simulation, upload it to the  actual system, and then watch, in real-time via the internet, as the  DARPA robot executes the user’s software. Teams involved in this  Outreach Track will be able to compete and collaborate with other teams  from around the country.

One of NI’s R&D engineers, Karl, has developed a LabVIEW wrapper for the DARPA arm simulator in his spare time and has graciously shared it on the NI Robotics Code Exchange (ni.com/code/robotics).

Using Karl’s code, you can directly control the arm simulator using LabVIEW. This means you develop your own control code and easily create UIs using LabVIEW’s graphical programming environment (two of the things LabVIEW is best for).

Check out Karl’s blog to request the code:

DARPA Arm Robot Controlled via LabVIEW

Visit the NI Robotics Code Exchange to cast your vote.

Hurry because the poll ends soon.

Researchers at the Carnegie Melon Robotics Institute are one step ahead of us, delivering the HeartLander, a miniature robotic device that can crawl around the surface of the heart, taking measurements and performing simple surgical tasks, all while the heart continues to pump blood throughout the body. I stumbled upon Nicholas Patronik’s Ph.D. thesis describing this project (and I encourage everyone to check it out). Here is what I found out:

An early prototype of HeartLander, a small robot that can adhere to and traverse a beating heart.

Robot-assisted surgery
NI technologies have been used for robot-assisted surgeries before, but the HeartLander robot addresses two major challenges of cardiac therapy and surgery:
•    Gaining access to the heart without opening the chest
•    Operating on the heart while it is beating

Several options for tackling these challenges exist today. Thoracoscopic techniques use laparoscopic tools inserted through the chest cavity to operate on the beating heart (think DaVinci Robot). While this avoids cracking open the rib cage (ouch!), even less invasive methods exist for accessing the heart and performing simpler procedures, like dye injections. Percutaneous transvenous techniques access inner organs through main arteries and veins. For example, a doctor can guide a heart stent through the veins in your thigh to treat blockages, and this procedure is performed on an outpatient basis. While these transvenous procedures are easier to recover from, thoracoscopic techniques offer much more flexibility in the complexity of surgical operations that can be performed.

Illustration of HeartLander

The HeartLander robot is considered a hybrid of these two approaches in that it can achieve fine control of thoracoscopic techniques while maintaining the ability to be performed on an outpatient basis, like the percutaneous transvenous techniques. It adheres to and traverses the heart’s surface, the epicardium, providing a tool for precise and stable interaction with the beating heart. Even better, it can access difficult to reach locations of the heart such as the posterior wall of the left ventricle (the side of your heart that faces your back).

How it works
The HeartLander is launched onto the surface of the beating heart through a small puncture underneath the bottom of the sternum. From there, the robot steadily traverses the epicardium like an inchworm. Offboard linear motors actuate the robot forward while solenoids regulate vacuum pressure to suction pads. Watch a video of early prototypes inching across an inflated balloon, a synthetic beating heart and a porcine beating heart to see HeartLander’s motion in action (warning: the video clips get progressively graphic in nature).

An umbilical tether sends and receives information between the HeartLander and the control station, where the pressure to the suction pads is monitored and controlled to maintain grip at all times. The mobility of the robot is semiautonomous: it uses a pure pursuit tracking algorithm to navigate to predetermined surface targets, and can also be controlled via teleoperation.

Two drive wires transmit the actuation from off-board motors for locomotion. A 6-DOF electromagnetic tracking sensor is mounted to the front of the body.

It can navigate to any location on the epicardium, with clock speeds up to 4 mm per second, and acquire localization targets within 1 mm. But what I think is particularly exciting about this application is that the robot’s motion is controlled entirely with LabVIEW software and NI data acquisition hardware.

So far, the HeartLander has been successfully demonstrated through a series of closed-chest, beating-heart porcine studies. We don’t have tiny robotic heart worms crawling around in us just yet. But we’re certainly excited to see how the HeartLander project progresses and we’re proud that NI technologies are helping pave the way for incredible, futuristic innovations like this.

Learn more about the HeartLander project on CMU’s website

Discover other autonomous robots designed and controlled using LabVIEW software