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April Edition 2021

Energid brings its NASA engineering roots to provide highly sophisticated motion control

Energid brings its NASA engineering roots to provide highly sophisticated motion control

Energid was founded in 2001, it provides Actin: the industry’s premier commercial software development kit (SDK) and tasking framework that supports real-time, adaptive motion control. For developers of robotic systems in dynamic environments, on moving platforms, using multiple arms or manipulators, or with unpredictable or varying workpieces or orientations, Energid offers differentiation and dramatically faster time to market.

In 2018, Energid was acquired by Teradyne. Teradyne brings high-quality innovations such as smart devices, life-saving medical equipment and data storage systems to market, faster. Its advanced test solutions for semiconductors, electronic systems, wireless devices and more ensure that products perform as they were designed. Its Industrial Automation offerings include collaborative and mobile robots that help manufacturers of all sizes improve productivity and lower costs. Energid continues operations under the same management and Energid’s headquarters, R&D, and engineering facilities remain in Massachusetts, USA.

Energid provides robotics consulting services to help you meet the evolving requirements and challenges in building advanced robotic systems and solutions.

Energid’s expert team works with OEMs and solutions providers to help create state-of-the-art robotic systems and software applications in many different industries, including manufacturing, energy, inspection, agriculture, aerospace, subsea, medical, and transportation. The firm can help you decrease your time to market, increase your development team’s productivity, mitigate risk and take your robotic system designs to the next level.

Areas of expertise:

  • High-DOF (axes) control: Coordinating seven or more axes as part of the kinematic solution. Examples include arm on rail, arm and rotary-tilt table, dual-arm, and humanoid kinematics
  • Multi Robot Task Coordination: Energid has experience with building distributed systems with task coordination and motion control of multiple robots simultaneously
  • Machine Tending Applications: Bin picking; Part pick/place
  • Industrial Processes: Including welding, dispensing and remote tool applications such as grinding
  • Inspection: Sensors mounted on the end-effector with either spot or continuous surface inspection with interfaces to external image processing systems
  • Assembly: Coordinating multiple robots in assembly tasks, including the use of force-feedback for admittance control (pin insertion) or impedance control (maintain force pressure contact)
  • Surgical Robotics: High speed, inverse kinematics and collision avoidance for multiple robotic arms maintaining end effector remote center-point placement

Solutions at its best

Robotic Oil Drilling: Robotic Drilling Systems (RDS) has built the world’s first fully autonomous robotic oil drilling rig in Stavanger, Norway. The highly advanced rig coordinates control of multiple robots to perform drilling operations. RDS scoured the world to find robotics software that was advanced enough to coordinate over 100 axes of motion in real-time while being robust enough for oil drilling operations. Only one software package was up to the task—Energid’s Actin. 

In less than six months, Actin was integrated into the drillfloor robot (a 6-axis electrically actuated robot with over a 3000 Kg payload capacity) and was precisely controlling the tool-tip. Since then, the firm has integrated Actin into a fully functioning prototype rig, with a robotic pipe-handler, lift, robotic roughneck, drillfloor robot, slips and more. The rig is fully controlled by Actin.

Medical Robotics: Take your robotic-based medical applications to the next level with Actin, the leading commercially available SDK for real-time control and simulation of medical robotic systems. It simplifies the development and deployment of medical robotic applications with cutting-edge tools for simulating and controlling complex mechanisms.

Startups and fortune-500 companies have leveraged Energid’s expertise and state-of-the-art Actin technology to bring their medical robot products to market faster, cheaper, and better than ever imagined.

“Our core Actin simulation technologies dramatically cut down the time to take a medical robot from concept to clinic. Our innovative simulation tools let engineers rapidly optimize their designs and enable clinicians to try them out before they are even built. Actin’s powerful visualization tools make it easy to convey engineering design to clinicians, customers, and investors,” the company said.

Benefits of Actin

Actin enables advanced real-time adaptive motion control. With Actin, you can coordinate motions between multiple robots, enabling disparate robotic systems to operate as one branching kinematic chain. The result: more human-like motions.

Real-Time Adaptive Control: The Actin® SDK can be used to create real-time controllers for robotic hardware. The Actin control framework is built on a powerful motion constraint and optimization engine.

With the Actin SDK, roboticists are free to focus on what the robot does and where the hands and tools should be, not on how they get there. For mechanisms with redundant kinematics, hand and tool motion can be accomplished in an unlimited number of ways. Actin automatically takes advantage of this kinematic redundancy for robot collision avoidance, joint limitation avoidance, minimized motion, optimized strength in robotic control and more.

Neil Tardella, CEO

Neil Tardella is the Chief Executive Officer at Energid. He provides leadership and strategic direction for the company.

Neil has spearheaded commercial initiatives in the energy, medical, and collaborative robotics sectors. Prior to joining Energid, Neil held key R&D and management roles at Northrop Grumman Norden Systems, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, and Technology Service Corporation. Neil has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hartford and a M.S. in Computer Science from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

“Energid provides the industry’s premier commercial software development kit (SDK) and tasking framework that supports real-time, adaptive motion control.”

“For developers of robotic systems in dynamic environments, on moving platforms, using multiple arms or manipulators, or with unpredictable or varying workpieces or orientations, Energid offers differentiation and dramatically faster time to market.”


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