The 2019 NI Trend Watch forecast was released to coincide with this year’s NIDays conference in London, one of a programme of regional events organised by the company for users of its software-based test and measurement tools. Available to read on the NI website, it’s designed to help engineers and scientists responsible for automated T&M in industry and academia to prepare for the challenges they’re likely to face in the next 12 months.

In the communications sector, NI warns that the advent of complex 5G networks means engineers charged with commercialising them will need to rethink the highly optimised techniques they have developed to test previous generations of devices.

Transport, too, faces major disruption if industry is to achieve the sort of take-up that is being predicted for driverless vehicles. Looming cost, technology and strategy trade-offs will be inevitable as it shifts from single-sensor to multi-sensor driver assistance systems.

The Internet of Things is a double-edged sword for test engineers. While it can greatly enhanced automated workflows, it’s increasing the sophistication and hence the complexity of the test environment for connected devices across both industrial and consumer applications.

Similarly, technological convergence that has the potential to accelerate the rate of innovation is also proving disruptive to existing test strategies. The key here, NI says, is for organisations to collaborate more as they strive to come up with solutions.

“These engineering trends are disrupting industries and product testing, leading to complex, unprecedented challenges,” Shelley Gretlein, NI vice-president of global marketing told the NIDays audience in London.

“However, they also drive extraordinary innovation, which requires a fundamental shift in our approach to automated test and automated measurement – a shift that is grounded in software-defined systems.”

NIDays also saw the announcement of the winners in NI’s Engineering Impact Awards for the EMEIA region, who will go forward to the global final in the USA next year.

Winning projects across seven sector categories ranged from Sonopill – an ultrasound endoscopy capsule developed by a consortium of the universities of Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Dundee and Leeds which uses microelectronic sensors to perform diagnostics as it travels through a patient’s gastrointestinal tract – to the Open University’s Practical Engineering Education Through a Web Browser. Using NI’s NI Elvis platform, the OU built a fully automated laboratory for hosting experiments that enables students to interact with remote apparatus in real time using standard browsers.

The overall winner, which came top in the connected vehicles category, was a project carried out by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) to create a system capable of accurately emulating satellite signals as part of vehicle testing. WMG researchers used NI hardware and software with scenario-generation tools to emulate satellite constellations and other RF signals and control their signal quality according to the driving environment. The resulting simulator environment makes it possible to test new infrastructure, communication and system technology in real-world conditions with a driver in the loop, allowing vehicle manufacturers to test earlier in the design cycle using a repeatable and controlled environment.

Top place in the competition’s hotly contested student design category went to a team from Aarhus University who used NI’s LabView tools to design, build and test a robot able to carry out underwater 3D mapping of icebergs. Its remotely operated submarine vehicle, equipped with two adjustable cameras and NI roboRIO controller, has already collected massive amounts of data and generated accurate models that can be used to track changes in iceberg size and shape during tests in polar waters.

The 2019 NI Trend Watch forecast was released to coincide with this year’s NIDays conference in London, one of a programme of regional events organised by the company for users of its software-based test and measurement tools. Available to read on the NI website, it’s designed to help engineers and scientists responsible for automated T&M in industry and academia to prepare for the challenges they’re likely to face in the next 12 months.

In the communications sector, NI warns that the advent of complex 5G networks means engineers charged with commercialising them will need to rethink the highly optimised techniques they have developed to test previous generations of devices.

Transport, too, faces major disruption if industry is to achieve the sort of take-up that is being predicted for driverless vehicles. Looming cost, technology and strategy trade-offs will be inevitable as it shifts from single-sensor to multi-sensor driver assistance systems.

The Internet of Things is a double-edged sword for test engineers. While it can greatly enhanced automated workflows, it’s increasing the sophistication and hence the complexity of the test environment for connected devices across both industrial and consumer applications.

Similarly, technological convergence that has the potential to accelerate the rate of innovation is also proving disruptive to existing test strategies. The key here, NI says, is for organisations to collaborate more as they strive to come up with solutions.

“These engineering trends are disrupting industries and product testing, leading to complex, unprecedented challenges,” Shelley Gretlein, NI vice-president of global marketing told the NIDays audience in London.

“However, they also drive extraordinary innovation, which requires a fundamental shift in our approach to automated test and automated measurement – a shift that is grounded in software-defined systems.”

NIDays also saw the announcement of the winners in NI’s Engineering Impact Awards for the EMEIA region, who will go forward to the global final in the USA next year.

Winning projects across seven sector categories ranged from Sonopill – an ultrasound endoscopy capsule developed by a consortium of the universities of Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Dundee and Leeds which uses microelectronic sensors to perform diagnostics as it travels through a patient’s gastrointestinal tract – to the Open University’s Practical Engineering Education Through a Web Browser. Using NI’s NI Elvis platform, the OU built a fully automated laboratory for hosting experiments that enables students to interact with remote apparatus in real time using standard browsers.

The overall winner, which came top in the connected vehicles category, was a project carried out by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) to create a system capable of accurately emulating satellite signals as part of vehicle testing. WMG researchers used NI hardware and software with scenario-generation tools to emulate satellite constellations and other RF signals and control their signal quality according to the driving environment. The resulting simulator environment makes it possible to test new infrastructure, communication and system technology in real-world conditions with a driver in the loop, allowing vehicle manufacturers to test earlier in the design cycle using a repeatable and controlled environment.

Top place in the competition’s hotly contested student design category went to a team from Aarhus University who used NI’s LabView tools to design, build and test a robot able to carry out underwater 3D mapping of icebergs. Its remotely operated submarine vehicle, equipped with two adjustable cameras and NI roboRIO controller, has already collected massive amounts of data and generated accurate models that can be used to track changes in iceberg size and shape during tests in polar waters.