LabVIEW and Biomimetics at NI-Week 2010

[Steve.J]

Seems like a run across the term biomimetics almost daily all of a sudden.  Biomimetics is simply the development of technology that mimics nature - kind of taking the "intelligent design" movement and turning it on its head.  It can be as simple as a camouflage design based on an organism's naturally evolved patterns and colors, or more complex as in the design of an autonomous robot with an operating strategy that mimics the behavior of a lobster.  Of course, the latter is much more interesting to the LabVIEW community, as robotics is a very hot area for National Instruments.

This year at NI Week 2010 (coming up next week!) we will be holding our first Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles Summit with presentations by some of the top researchers, scientists, and engineers working in the field of autonomous robots.  Biomimetics is a strategy being employed by neuroscience researchers who are trying to understand the basis for the control and behavior of animals by building increasingly complex artificial models of real organisms.  Similarly, robotics engineers are building ever more competent and independent autonomous robots by employing some of the strategies used by relatively simple animals to avoid danger or identify food.

Here are a few sessions titles from the Robotics and Autonomous Vehicle Summit that I hope to catch:

Biomimetic Mobile Robot Design with NI Single-Board RIO

Prototyping for Life Science Automation

Teaching a Walking Robot to See

Using Synthetic Neural Models to Augment Traditional Control Systems

Hope to see you at NI-Week this year!