NI adds machine vision to RIO devices

National Instruments has added machine-vision capabilities to Compact RIO and Single-Board RIO hardware devices.

These are intended to provide engineers with an integrated measurement and control platform for industrial and embedded systems.

With this integrated platform solution, NI provides a more efficient, all-in-one design with a smaller physical footprint and less system complexity.

With the addition of machine vision, engineers can use Compact RIO and NI Single-Board RIO devices in a variety of advanced measurement and control applications.

It is suitable for autonomous and semi-autonomous robotics applications for obstacle avoidance, pattern recognition and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), where advanced control and vision functionality are required.

Industrial surveillance applications served include machine condition monitoring and critical vessel monitoring, when connectivity to infrared cameras is vital.

Finally, the real-time OS and integrated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) used with Compact RIO and NI Single-Board RIO eases the process of FDA validation for embedded medical devices.

To acquire images, NI vision acquisition software has expanded to support Internet Protocol (IP) cameras, including those from Basler Vision Technologies.

In addition to native IP camera support, Movimed has released the AF-1501 analogue frame grabber for NI C Series products that can acquire monochrome images.

To process images, engineers can program and deploy image-processing libraries to Compact RIO and NI Single-Board RIO deployment targets with NI Labview 2009 graphical system design using the NI Vision Development Module 2009 software, which contains hundreds of image-processing and machine-vision functions.

Engineers can add vision capabilities to the following Compact RIO and NI Single-Board RIO controllers: NI cRIO-901x, NI cRIO-902x and the NI cRIO-907x and NI sbRIO-96xx systems.

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