NI announces Engineering Impact Awards finalists

National Instruments (NI) has announced the shortlist of finalists for its 2015 Engineering Impact Awards, which honour Northern Europe’s most innovative engineering projects using NI software and hardware.

The finalists in this year’s Engineering Impact Awards have combined their expertise with NI tools, in order to solve challenging engineering problems.

This year’s finalists include TBG Solutions, who have created a reliable and flexible control system for a new class of subsea cable survey and inspection remotely controlled vehicle by utilising CompactRIO, LabVIEW and LabVIEW Actor Framework. A team from Imperial College London will be competing with TBG in the Machine Control category as they have developed a hybrid power generator for use in place of diesel generators at construction sites and music festivals.

In the Physical Test and Measurement category, Lontra have created test beds to advance the design and increase the performance of a Blade Compressor while Muc-Off Ltd have used CompactDAQ and LabVIEW to create a test bed to develop the world’s fastest, most durable bicycle chain lubricants.

In the Student Design Competition the University of Leeds has entered the LabAtar, a project aimed to give fully immersive control of a robot using virtual reality to allow the user to see what the robot’s cameras see. In the future this could enable better human-machine interaction in application from search-and-rescue robots to interplanetary exploration.

Winners will be announced at the Engineering Impact Awards ceremony, held at The Royal Academy of Engineering, London, on Monday 2nd November. Several finalists will also present their applications in technical sessions at the NIDays conference the following day.