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Energid Technologies Corp. is working to make the control of real robots more reliable, and to use fake robots to see how the real thing would move on the moon.
The Cambridge-based robotics software maker is developing a codec — compression/decompression software — for the robotics industry, according to its chief technical officer, James English.
The codec would ease the transmission of large amounts of data — including location, video, audio, maps and haptics, the simulation of the sense of touch — sent back and forth over satellite, Internet, radio or telephone channels, English said. The technology could solve the problem of degraded or delayed video, also known as “jitter” — which cause breakdowns between a robot and its human operator: “They’ve already crashed the robot, and they don’t know it,” English said.
The codec could help in critical military situations such as disarming a bomb or potentially performing remote robotic surgery, English said. The company plans to have an early version ready by the summer, English said.
Energid’s software platform, Actin, can work with CAD software to simulate robot mechanics in 3-D animation. Last year, the 18-employee company — with 12 people in Cambridge and six in India — won a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research grant from NASA to simulate a robot’s mobility on lunar terrain. The project anticipates astronauts one day dropping off robots on the moon to build outposts, English said. NASA wants to find out how robotic bulldozers, augers and other tools would move on the moon to excavate a site, build a road or bury a reactor, he said.
Mark Smithers, COO of Boston Engineering, a contract engineering firm working on the Ghost Swimmer underwater autonomous vehicle, said a codec, if successful, would be useful and a good way for Energid to build its business. Smithers compared the project to the development of computer programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran and C. Such standards can spur innovation as others collaborate or leapfrog them, Smithers said.
“They’re looking at the robotics industry in its infancy and applying the lessons of web video and audio,” Smithers said.
Since 2001, Energid has been working on control software for NASA’s Robonaut robot. English said it is designed to be used with any robot, and any kind of control. Actin assigns constraints to a robot’s joints and instructs the joints on how to move within those constraints.
“You want to do something with the hand. That’s where the work gets done, but what you have control over is the joints, so there’s a disconnect,” he said.
The company is also developing grasping algorithms. In February, the company won a $500,000 Phase 2 SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation, which added to the $100,000 Phase 1 grant the company was awarded in 2007.
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