Quietly, and under the radar with not a single press release from either party, Teradyne (NYSE:TER), the company that acquired co-bot maker Universal Robots in 2015, acquired another robotic property, Energid, a Cambridge, MA-based integrator, engineering firm and developer of robot control, simulation and machine vision software. No financial details regarding the acquisition were disclosed.

Energid’s core product is Actin, a powerful control framework and operating system for commercial, industrial, and mission critical robots that is sold as a platform and software toolkit. Actin provides optimal control across vendors (Denso, Adept, Motoman, Kuka, Staubli, Schunk) and works with any robot system that provides access to its joint controllers. Actin is being applied to robotics applications in the industrial, medical, aerospace and energy sectors to enable real-time advanced motion control.

In the video below, Actin is enabling a vision system and a Universal Robot to find and pick from a moving target.

Neil Tardella, Energid CEO, said of the acquisition: “Energid is excited about its recent acquisition by Teradyne. We have been impressed by Teradyne’s overall robotics strategy and proven track record growing this segment of its business. Teradyne will be investing in Energid to further grow the current business and broaden the reach of Actin.”

Teradyne’s major business units are Semiconductor Test, System Test, Wireless Test and Collaborative Robots.

Andy Blanchard, Teradyne VP of Corporate Relations, said: “Teradyne acquired Energid in late February. The purchase price was not disclosed as it was not material to Teradyne’s overall results and we decided not to issue a press release.  Energid will continue to operate as a separate company, albeit owned by Teradyne. Energid has a very talented team working on a range of automation-related software products serving a broad range of commercial, government, and academic customers.  Strategically, we see opportunities for their software to complement Universal Robots’ capabilities, to improve the performance of existing tasks, and to open new applications.”

[I asked a financial analyst to define the terms ‘threshold requirement’ and ‘not material’ and he said:”Not material means it won’t move the needle [breach the SEC reporting threshold for publicly held companies] for key financial items such as revenue, net profit and shareholder equity. It may be safe to assume that the Energid/Teradyne transaction will not impact these lines so long as the acquisition price is less than 1% of Teradyne’s $2.14 billion of revenue in 2017.”]

Meet Energid at the Robotics Summit

Energid President and Chief Technical Officer James English will be speaking at the Robotics Summit and Showcase, May 23-24 in Boston, about robot simulation software.

In his talk “Enhance Your Robot Development Using Interactive Simulation,” English will describe how real-time digital simulation can be used to address to speed up and simplify the development of advanced robots. Interactive simulation allows anyone to see behaviors in real time, make fast changes, and move robots using the same control interfaces and software as will be deployed with hardware.

Here is the full agenda for the Robotics Summit and Showcase. Register by April 20 and save 20% with early-bird registration.