A recent Energid blog highlighted the QNX® Neutrino® RTOS in deploying mission-critical robotics systems. The following excerpts appear on the BlackBerry ThreatVector Blog, courtesy of Energid.
Leveraging Actin’s Modeling and Control Toolkit Using the QNX Neutrino RTOS for Surgical Robots
The Actin Toolkit is now more powerful than ever when combined with the reliability, performance, and security of the QNX Neutrino RTOS. Actin, the premiere commercially available SDK for real-time control and simulation of medical robotic systems, can dramatically accelerate the development of your robotics-based medical applications through its cutting-edge tools for modeling, controlling, and deploying complex mechanisms:
The Actin SDK can be used to design and test your system completely in simulation (left) followed by a seamless deployment of your application on hardware (right)
Actin’s powerful simulation tools can help surgeons make the most of their advanced robotic tools. By letting engineers rapidly optimize their designs, they can enable clinicians to try them out before they are even built. Selecting the best configuration can make even the trickiest procedures hassle-free so that they can be performed smoother, faster, and with improved patient outcomes.
Actin technologies are designed from the ground up to control systems with many axes and moving parts in ways that maximize their capabilities throughout the entire procedure. Actin’s advanced coordination algorithms keep medical procedures moving forward smoothly and eliminate the need to periodically stop to reconfigure robots into more amenable configurations.
Since no robot is complete until it has been deployed on hardware, Actin has been built from the ground up to support mission-critical systems and can be deployed on embedded systems. Actin provides easy integration with robots, sensors, and actuators and is compatible with the QNX Neutrino RTOS, an RTOS commonly used in medical devices and robots.
Reliable
The QNX Neutrino RTOS’s microkernel architecture isolates every application, driver, protocol stack and filesystem in its own address spaces outside the kernel. This means that a failed component won’t take down other components or the kernel; it can be restarted immediately, with minimal impact on system performance.
Available
The QNX Neutrino RTOS offers the determinism only a real-time OS can provide. Techniques such as adaptive partitioning guarantee critical processes get the cycles they need to complete their tasks on time, while maintaining the performance your complex embedded systems require.
Secure
The QNX Neutrino RTOS provides a comprehensive, layered approach to security. You can easily configure security profiles with the granularity you need for your systems, as well as monitor and audit their integrity.
Actin is backed by Energid’s unrivaled expertise in architecting, developing, and deploying software applications for complex robotic systems, including medical applications with unparalleled control. The Energid team can help bring a new robotic product to market quickly at reduced cost and risk.
Learn more about real-time operating systems (RTOS) with the BlackBerry Ultimate Guide to Real-time Operating Systems (RTOS) and the QNX Neutrino RTOS. For information on how Actin can accelerate development of your robot-based medical applications, contact Daniel Melanz.
The article, Leveraging Actin’s Modeling and Control Toolkit using the QNX Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) for Surgical Robots originally appeared on Energid and has been published here with permission.
