Entries for the 'Robotics' Category

When, besides in children’s cartoons (and my Christmas blogs), do you ever get to see robots dancing? At the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry! This past week I had another opportunity to check out cutting edge robotics at the museum. This event was showcasing Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao (pronounced “Now”) Robot, a top notch humanoid robot companion. Not only is this robot the star of th... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Anyone who has frequented my blog entries knows that I am one of the biggest robot-enthusiasts at DMC. That's why I was so excited to get a chance to attend a lecture at the Museum of Science and Industry given recently by Dr. Minoru Asada, a top researcher in modern robotics and one of the driving forces behind Robocup, and Mr. Ken Nagasaka, of Panasonic Factory Solutions of America. Aside from ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC was happy again to volunteer for a good cause with the FIRST Tech Challenge Robot competition here in Chicago.

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Well, it's here.  The moment you've all waited for.  Thanks to the holiday season, I have finally been able to follow up on my Roomba work!  I decided it would be a nice gesture to have Roomba do a little Christmas performance for everyone...

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Recently one of DMC's customers, LTS Scale, issued a press release describing the first fork-truck-mounted dimensional weighing system. DMC worked closely with this customer from the first stages of research through the development of the system and into product production, successfully delivering a flexible and robust system that met numerous design challenges along the way.  The s... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Once you are familiar with their capabilities and methodologies, Siemens PLCs have the potential to make controls programming quicker and easier than ever.

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For a DMC engineer it is not atypical to be faced with outdated, legacy technology.  Finding information on old industrial hardware, unfortunately, isn't as easy as looking up technical support on your new Dell computer.  The web of what corporation owns and supports a product line can quickly get unbearably complicated, but here are a few tips and tricks to help you find the answers you are looking for...

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Over the course of NI Week in Austin, National Instruments gradually introduced and demonstrated the new features that are being implemented in the LabVIEW 2009 release.  Many were logical steps forward in hardware and software development, some were long awaited and often requested functionalities or improvements, and a few were completely unexpected new features that were greeted with ooohs... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Every summer, National Instruments holds the NIWeek conference in their home town of Austin TX.  This year, DMC has three of us attending:  Jesse Batsche, Eric Nielsen, and myself. Monday was “Alliance Day”, tailored to NI Alliance Members, as well as the day for various closed sessions, such as the Big Physics conference to address technologies and trends related to large scale physi... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Some time ago, the staff of the Advanced Powertrain Research Facility at Argonne National Laboratory asked me if we could create a robotic driver to control speed of a vehicle on their dynamometer.  There are off-the-shelf solutions for this task but it would be difficult to get the level of configurability and integration needed with these systems. We used LabVIEW to develop a relative... [Read the rest of this blog...]

A few weeks ago, I was coerced by my girlfriend into buying one of those silly "floor cleaning robots".  Yes, I mean a Roomba.  I was skeptical, but I sat down and did some research.  Little did I know that while I had been slaving away religiously vacuuming my own floors (ok, occasionally vacuuming my own floors…)

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