NI CITIZENSHIP REPORT

Improve Everyday Life

Empowering Engineers in Developing Countries

Planet NI is a National Instruments program designed to empower engineers and students in developing countries to achieve economic prosperity and sustainable development by providing access to modern technology and engineering education. Through the Planet NI program, National Instruments is committed to nurturing local innovation by making engineering tools affordable, accessible, and relevant to applicable groups such as academic organizations, entrepreneurs, and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).

Planet NI is implemented at NI offices in emerging countries around the world where employees define the best way to meet the unique challenges their regions face. Local Planet NI programs collaborate with groups and individuals that share the Planet NI mission to improve the world through technology. Planet NI currently supports engineers and scientists in more than 10 countries including India, Mexico, and Brazil. In 2011, NI plans to expand the reach of existing Planet NI programs to include more engineers and deploy new programs in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Planet NI Around the World

SME Benefit Program

The SME Benefit Program supports entrepreneurs in India by providing access to modern technology at lower initial investments as well as professional product training and technical support. Through Planet NI, more than 140 SMEs in India received access to NI technology to help start companies that develop life-changing innovations and generate fulfilling jobs for local engineers.

CASE STUDY

Solar Energy Helps Keep Milk Safe in Rural India

Sorin Grama – Promethean Power Systems, Massachusetts

Every day, dairy processors in India are challenged with transporting milk from millions of individual farms in villages to central processing facilities in distant cities. With the NI graphical system design platform, we built a hybrid solar- and grid-powered refrigeration system to cool and store raw milk at the villages where the milk is produced. The system operates in rural areas where grid power is unreliable.

Our hybrid milk chiller cuts both transportation costs for dairy farmers and chilling costs in half because we use solar energy. Most importantly, cooling the milk at the source results in premium-quality, healthier milk that can be used for higher value products such as cheese and baby formula.

CASE STUDY

Building Mine-Detection Robots in Arabia

United Nations Development Program, Arabia

In South Lebanon and the surrounding region, there are an estimated 450,000 land mines and more than 10,000 unexploded cluster bombs, rendering more than 150 million square meters of land unusable. To raise awareness of the issue and develop a method for detecting and decommissioning these dangerous explosives, NI sponsored a two-year student design competition in Arabia to inspire young engineers to design a mine-detection robot. Teams were tasked with designing an autonomous or semiautonomous robot to detect and identify land mines and cluster bombs in rugged terrain.

NI Arabia has provided access to state-of-the-art hardware and software, which included NI Single-Board RIO modules, NI Smart Cameras, and LabVIEW software, to participating students. The winning robot prototype will be selected in July 2011.

NI offices around the world locally define and support their Planet NI programs by collaborating with groups and individuals that share the Planet NI mission to improve the world through technology.