Robotics Club Programming Portion

Question

My school has entered into a Robotics Tournament that competes several schools against each other(this is my school's first year). The objective of the robot is to shoot a ball into a hoop. I am a member of the Programming team. Our job as the programmers is to program a robot and a computer to control the robot. The computer has 2 joy sticks attached to it, one for moving the entire robot(spinning the wheels and causing the robot to move) and one is for the "throwing arm". A signal is going to be sent from the computer to the robot using wifi. All of the programming MUST be done in LabView.

I have never heard of LabView before until i joined this club and i have my doubts about it. The reason why we must use LabView is because most of the kids on the programming team have no programming experience whatsoever. LabView has to be able to interface with the joy sticks and then send that information to the robot using wifi. The micro controller on the robot supports LabView.

Now to my question, is LabView dynamic enough to preform this task? Can LabView even support networking? Can LabView even interface with the joy sticks? I have read a lot of the documentation for LabView from this website:

• http://www.ni.com/gettingstarted/labviewbasics/environment.htm

My concern is that LabView is not dynamic enough for what we are trying to use it for as a team and we are going to have to program the computer and the micro controller using C. There are only 2 people on the team who can program sufficiently in C so we would have to teach the rest of the members the basics of C.

All relevant answers are welcomed and appreciated.

Answer 1

LabVIEW can totally do this. I am biased: I've written a textbook on it and am teaching classes:-); I also do this for a living. In comparision to C, well, C can do anything, but LabVIEW does hardware on a much higher level. Doesn't mean I don't like bending pointers for a bit; but it's nice to not care about low-level functions for a while.

Interfacing a joystick is pretty simple, it looks like this: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/CA411647F224787B86256DD000669EFE To interface Wifi, it depends on how the robot should receive the information. TCP/IP would go like this: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/2710

Answer 2

The web page you provided is very introductory, "Hello world!" like. Just by learning that you can not get an idea about the LabVIEW potential. Sure you can do everithing with C, but with LabVIEW you will make the same task faster and I don't think you will need more than 2 team members working on the program.

Answer 3

I'm not sure what you mean by "dynamic enough", but it's certainly possible to create such a system in LabVIEW, and if the users have no experience, they're probably more likely to succeed if they use LV and they're probably going to enjoy it more. There are certainly many groups who use LabVIEW.

There are people who volunteer as mentors for FRC groups, so I would suggest you ask FIRST or your local NI office if they know of anyone (whether C or LV) who can help your group. If you ask NI, they might also be able to help you in other ways.

There's also a similar discussion here - Textual versus Graphical Programming Languages

Answer 4

LabView is dynamic, especially for the purposes of robotics club. A white paper outlines some of the possibilities. http://www.ni.com/white-paper/14133/en/

A great resource for people participating in robotics club is the Raspberry Pi website and blog. It is an excellent site to discover what others are doing and creating.

Consider studying the potential of robotics arms and reading white papers from companies that develop them for purposes such as laboratory automation. This is information that could help you if you decide to do this as a career. http://www.hudsonrobotics.com/products/microplate-handling/