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Desert Race Competitors Use NI Products to Build Rugged Autonomous Vehicles; Student Teams From Leading Universities Build Unmanned Cruisers to Travel From California to Nevada

Business Wire, Sept 28, 2005

AUSTIN, Texas -- Qualifying rounds for the second-annual Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge began today in California, as more than 40 teams from around the world compete for a chance to send their custom-built autonomous vehicles on an unmanned journey across the desert. Among the vehicles were three built by student teams incorporating National Instruments (Nasdaq:NATI) products -- including NI LabVIEW software, PXI modular hardware, Compact FieldPoint distributed I/O and Compact Vision System hardware.

The DARPA Grand Challenge Event, scheduled for Oct. 8, subjects qualifying vehicles to a challenging desert race route without any human interaction. Vehicles must be able to gather information about their surroundings through sensors and make tactical decisions on route planning, steering and obstacle avoidance. The treacherous predefined course route -- revealed to competitors only two hours before the race -- may be as long as 175 miles and take as long as 10 hours to complete. The winning team receives a cash prize of $2 million, but the ultimate goal of the event is to develop new technologies that will help save lives on dangerous battlefields where autonomous vehicles could be used instead of human-operated ones.

"It's exciting to participate in such cutting-edge development of new technologies that could really impact the future of vehicle development," said Alfred Wicks, associate professor of mechanical engineering and advisor for one of the two participating teams from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. "We were able to use National Instruments' rugged, modular hardware to create a highly responsive data acquisition system, and were able to easily make application tasks, responses and modifications through NI LabVIEW software. Because it is flexible and so easy to learn and use, LabVIEW has been indispensable to our project."

The two Virginia Tech teams, composed of undergraduate students, master's candidates and faculty members, integrated NI LabVIEW, PXI and Compact FieldPoint units as well as a CVS-1454 Compact Vision System into their vehicles, "ROCKY" and "CLIFF," built on Club Car frames and capable of speeds up to 25 mph. The teams used NI products to capture and preprocess information from the vehicles' three main navigation sensors, and then transmit the data to the four main NI PXI-1002 navigation and control units. These units perform final integration of the perceived environment and control the vehicle's steering, throttle and brake.

The plug-and-play compatibility of the NI hardware simplified the design process, while the LabVIEW graphical design environment helped the students quickly integrate the hardware components into a working system. Team Virginia Tech's previous Challenge vehicle, "CLIFF," also qualified to compete in this year's race, making the Virginia Tech Grand Challenge Team one of only two teams to have the honor of two entries. CLIFF shares many of the same features as ROCKY but boasts a different type of "obstacle avoidance system" for path planning.

The Desert Buckeyes from Ohio State University incorporated National Instruments products into their DARPA Grand Challenge entry, the Intelligent Off-road Navigator (ION). Team members used the single NI LabVIEW development environment during the design phase of their autonomous vehicle, built on a Polaris Ranger 6x6, to test the system earlier in the design process and reduce design iterations. The team specifically took advantage of NI products for the evaluation and development of a thermal imaging system for the vehicle.

"We used NI products during our design phase to simplify developing, testing and sometimes discarding various sensor technologies and approaches," said Umit Ozguner, team leader and electrical and computer engineering professor at Ohio State. "The tools provided by NI made the evaluations and comparison an easier task. Discarding less fruitful directions is very important in engineering, and having the right tools to make those decisions is especially valuable."

For more information on the DARPA Grand Challenge, readers can visit www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge.> About National Instruments

National Instruments (www.ni.com) is a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation -- a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Leveraging PCs and commercial technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs for test, control and design applications through easy-to-integrate software, such as NI LabVIEW, and modular measurement and control hardware for PXI, PCI, USB and Ethernet. Readers can obtain investment information from the company's investor relations department by calling 512-683-5090, e-mailing nati@ni.com or visiting www.ni.com/nati.> FieldPoint, LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI and ni.com are trademarks of National Instruments. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.