NASA SBIR 2004 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
ENERGID TECHNOLOGIES
124 Mount Auburn St, Ste. 200 North
Cambridge, MA 02138-5787
(888)547-4100

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
James English
jde@energid.com
124 Mount Auburn St, Ste. 200 North
Cambridge, MA 02138-5787
(888)547-4100

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
Energid Technologies will create a comprehensive software infrastructure for rapid validation of robotic designs. The software will support push-button validation through existing commercial design software, such as SolidWorks. After validation is invoked through the design-tool GUI, the robot design will transfer to separate networked software for analysis. An interface will be provided for communicating with many types of commercial analysis software, and Energid will provide its own analysis software through the common interface. This will allow interactive placement of any number of end effectors on any number of mobile or fixed-base mechanisms, each with any number of kinematic links and branches. Energid's validation software will provide dynamic simulation, including articulated-body and impact dynamics. The software will allow link descriptions, end-effector descriptions, control algorithms, and the environment to be arbitrarily exchangeable as modules. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) will be used for configuration, data transfer, and exchange.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 100 WORDS)
The design validation tool will have application to all of NASA's robotic missions, including orbital missions, lunar missions, Mars missions, asteroid reconnaissance, and Galilean satellite landers. For all future robotic missions, robotic devices and vehicles will progress through a design cycle. The proposed validation tool will broadly reduce cost and improve schedule in these efforts. After Phase II, the validation software will be ready for use, and Energid will partner with larger NASA contractors to commercialize it through contracts that both apply the software directly to the design cycle and leverage the toolkit for manipulator control and human interface development.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (LIMIT 100 WORDS)
Energid will offer the software to industries needing sophisticated design and validation tools. There has been a recent increase in the use of exploratory robots in a wide array of application domains, such as homeland security, disaster relief (search and rescue), archeological explorations, mine detection, and other applications. Also, Energid will extend the software components developed under this effort into a commercial software toolkit that can be licensed. Customers will purchase the toolkit as software libraries and header files. By linking these libraries into their code, developers will have full access to all the capability provided by the toolkit.