Session Recap: KUKA youBot and LabVIEW

[Travis_M.]

KUKA is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of industrial robots. In this session, Dr. Rainer Bischoff from KUKA and Andy Chang from NI give an overview of KUKA and their recent collaboration with NI to integrate an NI CompactRIO on a KUKA youBot for this years’ NIWeek.

     The robotics market is changing and people want to have more control over systems. KUKA is changing to meet these needs by adding more intelligence to arms and mobile platforms. People are requesting standardization among platforms to allow more reuse and provide references for their work. New KUKA products include the omniRobot (a mobile platform slightly larger than the youBot), a lightweight 7-DOF arm, and the youBot which features a mecanum steering base and an open-source controller. Dr. Bischoff shows some interesting applications for the youBot in research including a cooperative tower building application, a ‘gravity compensation’ arm demo, and a ball-following application for teaching.

     Factories of the future will feature more robots that must work with people in the same environment. To help researchers solve many industry challenges, the youBot provides a strong and versatile hardware platform while NI LabVIEW and reconfigurable I/O products (such as CompactRIO) can provide the tools to easily write programs and add sensors and actuators to your robot. The Robotics Environment Simulator (a feature in the LabVIEW Robotics 2012 Module) helps you create a software model of your robot and use it within the LabVIEW development environment. With the NI hardware abstraction I/O layer (HAIOL), it is very easy to switch the target of your code between the Environment Simulator and the real robot. There are quite a few simulation environments available for use, but the LabVIEW Environment Simulator’s ability to easily switch between deployment of code to the simulator and the real robot is very powerful. As Dr. Bischoff states: “One thing I fear is that everyone is going to create their own simulation system—there is no standard.  I hope LabVIEW can change that.”

     The session ended with a live demonstration of the KUKA youBot being controlled by an iPad through an application developed in LabVIEW. At first, the application was deployed to the simulator, but a simple change in the code allowed the application to be deployed to the real robot.