Energid Technologies Corporation

Actin is a software toolkit for designing, simulating, and controlling robots, created by the American firm Energid Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Actin began as simulation software and control software, during contract work by Energid for NASA's Johnson Space Center, funded by the Small Business Innovation Research legislation. ctin was developed for NASA robots, and the software was first demonstrated on a Mitsubishi PA-10 robot while under development for the Robonaut 1 project at NASA.

Prior to 2011, the firm also began selling Actin as a design and control software package for robotics applications, with an emphasis on user-friendly design-optimization. The target markets were the military, agricultural, healthcare (see also medical robot), and industrial segments.

Actin is a robotics software toolkit (a type of software development kit), which provides features for designing robotic control systems, and for simulating those robots in software.

Actin can be used for control of any robot or group of robots that allow some method of communication. It provides functions related to robot motion, collision avoidance, joint-limit avoidance, and singularity avoidance. Actin supports an unlimited number of joints, degrees of freedom for those joints, and branches. Actin can control these kinematically redundant, bifurcated, and multi-robot systems in real time.

Actin software supports the following communication protocols for connecting the human operator (or autonomous agent software control system) to physical robotic hardware: Modbus, EtherCAT, CANopen, Serial, Data Distribution Service, UDP, and TCP.

In addition to the robot-control features, Actin also provides a simulator for the robot which is being designed. This capability allows roboticists to tune and test their designs in a virtual environment via simulation, prior to actually building a physical robot which implements the design.