Recently, National Instruments brought out its LabVIEW Robotics 2009 graphical system design platform for robotic and autonomous control systems. What's it good for?

For one, it can help companies like Alliance Spacesystems deliver space robotics that can operate in extreme environments on Earth and on Mars.

The Alliance Spacesystems robotics design lab uses NI software and software-defined modular hardware to helps rapidly develop, demonstrate, and test a concept prior to implementation on flight hardware.

NI tools were especially useful during concept demonstrations and the prototyping phase of their in-space robotic arms.

Alliance Spacesystems claims that the graphical programming of all LabVIEW tools greatly simplifies complex tasks, such as advanced control algorithm development and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test configurations.

A couple of more examples:

A NI single-board RIO was used to assist in creating an automated "Mosquito" soil-hardness tester tool.

Also, the company's Aerospace Robotics Testbed had an application that demanded a real-time OS and the utmost in reliability in stability and control. They used CompactRIO with low-level control algorithms residing on FPGA and higher-level algorithms, such as the inverse kinematics residing on the embedded, real-time processor.

More details can be found here.

There are many other down to earth robotics applications where prototype tools like those from National Instruments can come in handy.

Care to share your experience?