On the surface LabView and Microsoft Robotics Studio appear to me to have a very similar programming paradigm and environment.
Is it fair to compare these two products, or are they in different leagues?
The first one (LabVIEW) is for the application development system. The second one (Update Suite) is for the FRC tools like the Driver Station. Make sure you have installed the FRC Update Suite in your computer. January 29, 2018 RoboJackets Labview Workshop The Georgia Tech RoboJackets have made available the Power Point for the recent Labview Workshop at the FRC Kick-Off Event. Note that Mac OS X is my operating system of choice, but after some research I concluded that LabVIEW runs on Mac OS, but the FIRST Robotics add-ons and driver station support are only written for Windows, so I relented, and installed Parallels on any Mac OS X systems that I want to use for FIRST Robotics. The FIRST Robotics Competition is an international high school robotics competition that gives students real-world engineering experience.
I am hoping someone who has used both products will help compare and contrast them so that I can understand when it is appropriate to use one or the other.
Jason Plank3 Answers
Disclaimer. I have not worked with Microsoft Robotics Studio. I only looked at the fact sheet and some of the documentation. However I have a great deal of knowledge of LabVIEW. So this answer might be (and probably is) biased.
History wise LabVIEW has been around for 20 years and has the following features which MSRS doesn't have (from the first glance).
- Platform independent (LV compiles on Windows, Linux, Mac and various embedded platforms), however hardware support varies
- A compiler, directly into machine code
- LabVIEW is a programming language not targetted at robotics but originated in Test and Measurement
- Extensive DAQ and data analysis support
The VPL (MSRS) looks very clumsy compared to LabVIEW code, it looks like MS doesn't really makes the switch to visual programming (or is not allowed by patents from third parties).
Price wise, MSRS is much friendlier with a free 'hobbyist' version, while a LabVIEW base begins around $1300.
Additional MSRS does not run on the robot, it only controls the robot via the robot API (bluetooth or wired), while LabVIEW (and more specific NXT-G) run on the processer inside the robot stand-alone.
What might be important is the LabVIEW is the main software product of NI while MSRS is one of many products of MS, so support and development should have a higher priority.
Ton
Dennis Williamson
First Robotics 2018 Labview For Mac Student
I have programmed extensively with MSRDS and to a lesser extent with LabVIEW and here is my opinion. Earlier, most of our software used to developed using LabVIEW but the last few years we have been moving a major part of it to C# because it is much easier to do objected oriented programming using a language like C#. I personally feel MSRDS and in particular the Concurrency Coordination Runtime (CCR) is so underrated partly because of the not so detailed documentation. Although the MSDN forums are excellent, we are required to search through them to find out some of the things that I feel should have been part of the documentation. Another excellent source of information to refer is the book 'Professional Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio' by Kyle Johns and Trevor Taylor.
Coming back to the comparison, I feel both LabVIEW and MSRDS (although I am not sure about LabVIEW Robotics) follow different programming methodologies. Although it has been targeted to Robotics, MSRDS is used to harness asynchronous behavior in any application. CCR has some excellent coordination primitives (such as Joins and Interleaves) and it makes asynchronous programming a lot easier. DSS is used to develop service oriented applications that are distributed across multiple nodes residing in the same machine or across different machines. We developed a framework for developing Laboratory Automation Systems using MSRDS. The framework is used to develop distributed component based software that is both thread-safe and responsive.
It is also worth mentioning that Task Parallel Library Data Flows in .NET 4.5 is based on the CCR concepts and also the concepts from .NET RX. I suggest you consider looking at them as well.
Thanks,
Venkat
Venk KVenk KNi Labview For Mac
I think Ton hit it on the nose, but there a couple key points I disagree on.
Independent of price LabView is a far superior system for automation and embedded programming. However, there is the catch that without a license LabView will break the bank a few times over. Depending on your targeted platform, you could easily spend several thousand dollars for a development environment.
Both systems do have a compiler. For a while LabView was restricted to only a few embedded environments, but with the addition of an ARM compiler there are now a huge number of supported hardware systems. LabView is compiled in real time as you program, MSDS is compiled on request (as far as I know).
LabView is absolutely targeted to robotics. NI has put forth a lot of tools for robotic applications and many of the ideas taken from automation can be dropped right into a robotics setting. As an interesting note, the FIRST Robotics Competition exclusively uses NI hardware (the cRIO) and LabView is a popular programming option.
RDS's visual programming and LabView's visual programing aren't really comparable. They don't operate by the same paradigms.
RDS does create machine code and the code can run on a robot without intervention.
If you are looking to buy a complete robotics system for development with LabView check out this page: http://www.ni.com/robotics/how_to_buy.htm
Just as a bit of background, I am a certified LabView developer and have used RDS with the lego NXT system as an instructor.
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Welcome to the GRIP wiki!
What is GRIP?
GRIP (the Graphically Represented Image Processing engine) is a program for rapidly prototyping and deploying computer vision algorithms, primarily for robotics applications. It is currently in an early state of development.
Labview 2018 Download
Why GRIP?
First Robotics 2018 Houston
Teams participating the FIRST Robotics Competition are often presented with challenges requiring the use of computer vision for extra points. To aid in this, students participating in FIRST are given access to industry‐grade computer vision toolkits, such as OpenCV and the NI Vision software. However, the six‐week build season required by FIRST makes it hard for teams to invest time in learning new programming languages and SDKs, or experiment with algorithms and parameters.
GRIP is our attempt to solve this problem by providing software for computer vision that is easy to learn, experiment with, and deploy!
##How was GRIP made?
We used the JavaFX platform and OpenCV to make GRIP.
##How can you help?
Our goals are to make GRIP :
User-friendly!
We want to make using GRIP as intuitive as possible for all your most common computer vision tasks. We're currently working on this with help from FIRST team beta-testers, who will be using GRIP to try to solve this year's vision challenge.
Portable!
We want GRIP to operate smoothly on Windows, Mac, AND Linux machines, as well as able to run without graphics on an embedded Linux ARM processor.
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Below is a 1.5 hour long video explaining how GRIP works under the hood and how the source code is structured.
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If you have any suggestions to help us in these goals, you can contact us by gitter https://gitter.im/WPIRoboticsProjects/GRIP