Session Recap: Robot Operating System and LabVIEW

[Travis_M.]

In this short session, Ryan Gariepy, CTO of Clearpath Robotics, gave an overview of using LabVIEW and ROS from WillowGarage.

     ROS, which stands for Robot Operating System, though calling it an “operating system” is a misnomer.  ROS consists of a communication standard defining how to exchange data between robots or components of robots. ROS is also an open-source development platform with a large (and growing) community of APIs, drivers, algorithms, and more that can be used in building a robotics system. There have been requests for interoperability between ROS and LabVIEW so that students and researchers can have their LabVIEW powered robot communicate with a ROS library, and so that users can easily include community-developed ROS content on their robots.

     There is limited support in ROS for real-time OSs such as those found on NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) products, and since ROS is primarily text-based and difficult to install on anything other than Ubuntu Linux, it has more appeal to CS degree types than it might for the average Robotics Engineering student.  It’s much easier to use LabVIEW and RIO for programming, hardware I/O, and real-time control and then find a way to use libraries and algorithms from the vast ROS community where needed.

     Clearpath Robotics has developed a toolkit (information here) that allows LabVIEW to communicate with ROS which opens up many possibilities for LabVIEW users to bring in content from the vast ROS community for use with LabVIEW. To demonstrate the new toolkit, Ryan controlled a TurtleBot (an education and research evaluation platform that is gaining popularity) using the ROS toolkit in LabVIEW.

     Have you wanted to use ROS and LabVIEW together?  I’m interested to hear about your application—sound off in the comments!