Robot Operating System and

LabVIEW
Ryan Gariepy
Clearpath Robotics
Agenda
• ROS as a compliment to LabVIEW
• Combined ROS-LabVIEW systems
• LabVIEW control of ROS
• ROS control of LabVIEW
• Toolkit Details & Next Steps
Introduction to ROS
• Initially developed ~2007
• Maintenance/development under Willow Garage
in 2008
• Significant adoption began in 2010
• Now maintained by the nonprofit Open Source
Robotics Foundation (2012)
• ~160 public ROS repositories
• ~3000 available packages
Aspects of ROS

Middleware Ecosystem

Community
Community
ROS & LabVIEW Robotics
Category ROS LabVIEW Robotics
OS Support Linux Windows, Mac, Linux, RT, etc…
Real-time Support - +
General Architecture + -
Low-level Hardware Support - +
High-level Hardware Support + -
Applicable Libraries + -
Tutorial Quality - +
Tutorial Volume + -
Applicable Community Size + -
LabVIEW Control of ROS
Use cases: LabVIEW

• GUI development for GUI VI

ROS-enabled robot Think

• Quick LabVIEW
integration of ROS- ROS
supported sensor Bridge

Sense Act
LabVIEW Control of ROS
LabVIEW

GUI VI

Think

ROS

Bridge

Sense Act
LabVIEW Control of ROS
LabVIEW Control of ROS
 LabVIEW Control of a Turtlebot
sudo apt-get install ros-electric-brown-remotelab
rosrun rosbridge rosbridge.py
ROS control of LabVIEW
Use cases: ROS

• Write algorithms which Sense Think

link to OpenCV, PCL, etc Bridge

• Apply the power of
LabVIEW hardware LabVIEW

• Provide ROS systems

with real-time features Act
ROS control of LabVIEW
ROS
IMU

Kinect roscore Husky A200

Bridge

LabVIEW

sbRIO-9606
LabVIEW RT

Arm Hardware
ROS control of LabVIEW
ROS control of LabVIEW
ROS control of LabVIEW
ROS control of LabVIEW
Toolkit Details
• Free beta on the NI Tools Network, certified
LabVIEW Compatible
• Base functionality can run on RT targets
• Dynamic message creation requires non-RT
system
• Images/point clouds not yet supported
• The more questions and comments, the faster
we get to v1.0!