Actin^TMToolkit for Robot Simulation

Fast simulation-based validation using just your CAD models.

Actin will tell you what your hardware will be capable of doing where it can reach, what forces it will experience, and how fast it will perform. Actin is for robot designers that need to understand and improve their designs before they are built. It is also for robot applications engineers that need to be sure existing hardware will work in new environments and scenarios.

Actin is a software toolkit with components that can be integrated with your software. It also includes stand-alone applications that can be used immediately without any need to write software. Actin tools can load a model from a CAD format and automatically create a control system so you can interactively experiment with the robot or execute parametric or randomized studies.

Actin provides many unique capabilities for simulating robotic systems:

• Fast algorithms - Actin provides multiple kinematic and dynamic simulation algorithms, the best for each type of mechanism
• Impact dynamics - simulation capability includes calculating the physics-based forces of rigid-body impact
• Integrated control - powerful automatic control of articulated mechnisms is provided as part of the simulation
• Diagnostic information - robot kinematic and dynamic data can be plotted in real time or saved and stored in many formats
• Broad support - most articulated and bifurcating mechanisms are supported, with 100 or more moving parts
• Many joint types - many types of robot joints are supported, including general definition using dynamic link libraries
• Rendering - Actin includes easy-to-use integrated high-fidelity 3D rendering
• Third party support - Actin supports loading models from commercial CAD and artistic software packages