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On Monday, National Instruments announced one such platform. It's called LabView Robotics. In addition to LabView, the popular data-acquisition application, the package includes a bunch of tools specific to robotics. It can import codes in various formats (C, C++, Matlab, VHDL), offers a library of drivers for a wide variety of sensors and actuators, and has modules for implementation of real-time and embedded hardware. NI says engineers could use the package to both design and run their robotic systems. 

Robots mean many things to many people, and National Instruments offers intuitive and productive design tools for everything from designing autonomous vehicles to teaching robotics design principals. The NI LabVIEW graphical programming language makes it easy to program complex robotics applications by providing a high level of abstraction for sensor communication, obstacle avoidance, path planning, kinematics, steering, and more.

D-Wave Systems, which in 2009 partnered with Google to test a prototype quantum computer for detecting vehicles in images, announced that it has now sold the first commercial quantum computer. The D-Wave quantum computer, called Rainier, solves discrete optimization problems using quantum annealing. The computer was sold to Lockheed-Martin for an undisclosed price. It is supercooled, requires 15 kilowatts, and supports APIs in multiple programming environments including Python, Java, C++, SQL, and MATLAB.