Simplifying and Reducing the Costs of Robotic Control with NI LabVIEW, NI-DAQ, and Vision
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Author(s):
Zeng Li, Phd - Food Science Australia
Industry:
Food/Beverage
Products:
Machine Vision, Distributed I/O, PXI/CompactPCI, LabVIEW, Data Acquisition
The Challenge:
Unifying control components and software and developing a flexible interface for commercial application of ABB robots.
The Solution:
Using National Instruments PXI platform, LabVIEW with image acquisition, and multifunction I/O boards to develop a unified system that facilitated communication with the robot controller and also integrated vision analysis software, sensor feedback, and peripheral control.
"Using National Instruments software and hardware, we not only reduced costs by $50,000, but also reduced development time by two and a half months."
Reducing Costs, Increasing Safety
The Equipment and Automation Innovation (E&AI) Section of Food Science Australia develops processing equipment for the food industry. E&AI recently took part in several projects with the meat industry using off-the-shelf robots to perform tasks that help reduce production cost and improve the quality of the goods produced, while also increasing operational safety. Because these projects aim at commercial installation and trialing, the finished system must prove reliable and well supported, with a friendly control interface suitable for even the novice user. National Instruments products helped us reach these goals, saving us $50,000. To achieve project objectives, we had to develop a unified system that facilitated communication with the robot controller and also integrated vision analysis software, sensor feedback, and peripheral control.
Achieving Project Objectives
The IRB series robots used by E&AI are all six-axis actuated robots with S4C+ controllers. Special sensors attached to the robots include a 3D laser ranger system, a time-of-flight system, and an image analysis system to detect the work object positioning.
The robotic applications are all multidisciplinary systems. One previous implementation required a control system consisting of a Linux image processing module, a generic servo motion control module, and a PLC motion controller. The effective integration and manipulation of the system proved extremely complicated.
The objective of our project was minimizing the number of the control and operation components while also unifying the software integration. Ultimately, because of the use of NI products, we can deliver a simple, user-friendly system to the industry client.
The robotic system consists of an IRB robot, an additional servomotor motion and a work end-effector. Having considered the control functions, integration flexibility, and unification costs of several off-the-shelf commercial control systems, we chose National Instruments PXI 1002 controller with a multifunction I/O PXI 6040E board, a digital I/O board, and a PXI 1409 image acquisition board. We found the NI system one of the most complete and flexible commercial systems available today. The added advantage of the embedded Phar Lap real-time operating system offers an extra level of reliable control -- one of the major concerns for E&AI control engineers.
We linked the PXI controller with a medical ultrasound unit, laser, Tempsonics sensors, and digital I/O switches. It communicates with a servo motor controller to provide 7th axis of movement. Communication with the PXI controller and an ABB S4C+ robot controller occurs via an Ethernet link.
Implementing Five Main Tasks
We designed the operation interface with LabVIEW. The interface has integrated and unified codes to implement the five main tasks -- measurements, I/O, motion control, image processing, and robot communication.
The PXI controller becomes the primary controller and commands system operations and the transfer of information among the robot and other peripheral equipment and sensors. Although the structured code of the LabVIEW program carrying out these five main tasks is quite large, the front panel presents one simple interface that any operator can easily and quickly manage.
After the system acquires images, the VIs provided in NI-IMAQ complete the processing. Types of functions include image quality assessment, buffering, image inversing, convolution, threshold, particle removal, and image centroid calculation. Communication builds up using the ActiveX controls (technologies based on Component Object Model) in WebWare software, provided with the ABB robot. Once again, LabVIEW fully supports this part of the application. Because ABB does not support the real-time operation of the sensor-based robot, we used a PXI controller to ensure that the robot functions correctly. We built a handshaking function into the control interface to handle the transferring of data.
Using National Instruments software and hardware, we not only reduced costs by $50,000, but also reduced development time by two and a half months. What used to take one engineer and two researchers now takes only one full-time researcher. In addition, we greatly simplified our maintenance with online monitoring and the data acquisition functions of our new system.
Overall, we created an application that lowered costs, increased safety, achieved all of our project objectives, and included a user-friendly system for our customers.
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