Wind River donates VxWorks Platform

ATLANTA, USA: Wind River has announced the donation of 4,000 licenses for its VxWorks platform and Wind River Workbench to the 2009 FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition.

The donated software was provided to 1,680 teams comprising 42,000 high school students, giving them the opportunity to work in a real industrial development environment as they built robots for the 2009 competition season.

“We are thrilled with Wind River’s VxWorks donation to the robotics competition,” commented Bill Miller, director, FIRST Robotics Competition.

“Providing high school students with the opportunity to tackle real-world issues in robotic design is critical to our mission of helping inspire the next generation of innovators and engineers,” added Miller.

Longtime industrial customer and collaborator National Instruments chose VxWorks as the provider of the C programming software that can be used to program the National Instruments CompactRIO control and data acquisition system adopted by the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Wind River’s software was selected based on its ability to improve and accelerate the development of software on industrial applications, as well as to provide students with a real-world development environment.

“We have been impressed by the robust platform that Wind River offers and its ability to help speed time-to-development and reduce cost for the FIRST teams who program CompactRIO using the C programming software,” said Joel Sumner, senior software group manager at National Instruments.

The FIRST Robotics Competition challenges teams of high school students and their mentors to build robots in a six-week timeframe using a standard set of software and parts.

By using the VxWorks platform, students gain the same advantages as Wind River’s industrial customers including decreased development time, debugging/tuning capabilities and a proven, robust real-time operating system rich in supportive middleware components.