Actin coordinates motion of the joints and base for one or more robots. A developer just gives desired tool motion through a simple language, and Actin produces real-time algorithms for setting motor positions and rates. Actin works with almost any joint type or tool type and with an unlimited number of degrees of freedom and branching connections.
The motion you get is miraculous smooth, fluid movement that avoids collisions and joint limits, optimizes strength, and does the work that is needed.
Main Features :
- provides tools for geometric reasoning
- supports cooperation of multiple robotic manipulators
- can be used to dynamically simulate physical environments
- supports three-dimensional rendering
- provides basic tools for machine vision
- can be used for network TCP/IP communications
Extensible Markup Language (XML) - developers can easily connect code with components from the Actin toolkit to build XML-configurable C++ objects. In addition to reading and writing themselves in XML, all XML-configurable objects can write their own validating schemas.
Mathematical and Geometrical Tools - Actin provides three-dimensional vector math and matrix routines. Conversion utilities for three-dimensional quantities are included. Orientations can be set from quaternions, Euler angles, Rodrigues parameters, angle-axis, direction cosine matrices, and so forth. more
Kinematic Control - Actin automatically calculates joint rates or positions to give desired hand velocities or positions based on the manipulator model description. Manipulators with any number of links, any number of bifurcations (branches), nonstandard joint types, and nonstandard end-effector types are supported.
Dynamic Simulation - Actin includes full and accurate Newton-Euler rigid body dynamics on all articulated links and impact dynamics between obstacles. Dynamics are calculated for nontraditional joint types, as well. Both the Composite Rigid Body Inertia algorithm and the Articulated Body Inertia algorithm are implemented.
Rendering - Actin provides cross-platform rendering and visualization capability. Any manipulator can be viewed through an easy-to-use interface and any number of manipulators can be shown in the visualization. The specular properties of surfaces can be set, bit mapping can be used, and any number of lights can be configured.
Machine Vision - Actin includes methods for capturing images with a USB camera, firewire camera, or frame grabber. It also includes algorithms for analyzing captured images and using the results as information to feed back to the controller, as well as camera calibration algorithms that allow for the automatic calculation of camera parameters, such as focal length and position/orientation.
Network Communications - Actin includes C++ classes for networked robot communications. Support is implemented both for TCP/IP and UDP/IP communications. A networking stream class is implemented to allow the transmission of control systems described in XML from one network location to another.
Platform support - Both Linux and Windows are supported.
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