NI sbRIO + LabView

In my robotics course, we got a chance to play with National Instruments sbRIO robotic starter kit. It is an awesome piece of hardware having a controller and an FPGA along with heavy wheels. The image is shown below. The eyes are the ultrasonic sensor which measures the distance from the object.

Front View

The best thing about the robot is that it is coded in LabView graphical coding language and is programmed via Ethernet. LabView 

is amazing in a sense that it allows to easily run a complex code without writing a single line of code. The power of visualization which it provides is one of the best I have even seen. There are lot of inbuilt modules which represent functionality of various components like motors, encodes, sensors, etc. So just place them and connect them and voila, the code is ready.

Chassis

This post is just an overview of the hardware and software which I have been using and will write a separate post on LabView coding soon.

I have done a project on controlling this robot using IR and will share it soon.

Top View