National Instruments and Denso Robotics, a leader and pioneer in manufacturing automation using robotics technology, today announced their collaboration to integrate NI measurement and vision technology with Denso robotic arms. The collaboration increases productivity and performance in automated test, research and flexible manufacturing applications. In today's trend toward high-mix, low-volume manufacturing, there is pressure to reduce cost and shorten development time. A new LabVIEW library of graphical functions makes it possible for engineers and scientists to address both concerns by integrating all aspects of a robotics system within a single NI LabVIEW application without the need for complex robotics programming expertise.

"LabVIEW is a preferred application development environment for many of the world's engineers and scientists," said Toyohiko Ito, director at Denso Wave, a Denso group company that develops and manufactures industrial robots. "Encouraging customers to use LabVIEW to control Denso robots will help increase their efficiency and reduce their time to market."

The new ImagingLab Robotics Library for Denso, from NI Alliance Partner ImagingLab, communicates directly with Denso controllers to command and control Denso robotic arms through LabVIEW software. The new library is an easy-to-use collection of graphical functions that provide the ability to use a single software environment to control and integrate every aspect of a machine, ranging from part handling and robot control to advanced measurements and machine vision. Due to the ease of use of LabVIEW, engineers who normally would not use industrial robotics now can integrate them into their applications to automate laboratories, precisely assemble components and test complex parts.

"We used LabVIEW to integrate a Denso VS-6577 robot with spectral analyzers into a fully automated analytical test station without the need to learn another robotics programming language," said Dylan Jones, principal scientist at Genzyme. "The ImagingLab Robotics Library for Denso was an off-the-shelf solution for integrating the robotic arm. Conservatively, we estimate that with this test station we will achieve a tenfold increase in analytical throughput."

The ImagingLab Robotics Library for Denso works with LabVIEW Real-Time systems, which combines LabVIEW graphical programming with the power of a real-time operating system, allowing engineers and scientists to build real-time applications. The library also works with NI Smart Cameras for integrated vision-guided robotics and NI data acquisition hardware for the measurement of both simple and highly sophisticated applications.