Motivation for LabVIEW

Prior to the start of our work, the acoustic source localization project had been primarily Matlab based. When the decision was made to revamp the acoustic source localization system to allow it to run in real time in order to incorporate robot movement functionality, LabVIEW was chosen as the primary programming language. A brief explanation of LabVIEW as a dataflow programming language and developing environment can be found at National Instruments.

The motivation for using LabVIEW was that it offers a number of distinct advantages in the integration of various tasks which a dynamic system would need to run simultaneously in order function effectively. To run an acoustic source localization system in real time, incorporating useful robotic movement of the sensors, requires the integration and synchronization of signal waveform generation, sound output functionality, data acquisition, signal processing, plotting of the source estimation, and constructive commands for robot movement based on the localization, all occurring in parallel with one another.

LabVIEW also appeared especially attractive because of its pre-existing integration with the programmable Lego MindStorm robot series. This functionality proved very useful, as we were able to command robot movement and allow the system to receive feedback of this movement all within LabVIEW code. Incorporating each of these aspects of the code into LabVIEW, rather than calling on some other program to carry out the robot functionality was useful in developing the synchronization of the robot movement process by ensuring that it behaves in accord with other processes of the system. Further explanation of this synchronization can be found in overview of code's synchronization structure.