Synapticon has won the A3 Innovation Award at Automate 2026 in Chicago for ACTILINK-JD with POSITRON Safety AI. Presented by the Association for Advancing Automation, the award recognises the combination of a high-density actuator family with a system-level safety architecture designed for humanoid and legged robots. Gonzalo Buelta, Chief Growth Officer at Synapticon, accepted the award in Chicago.

Safety inside the joint

ACTILINK-JD integrates a high-torque motor, a single-stage planetary gearbox and a SOMANET Circulo servo drive into a single self-contained joint, with peak torque from 17 to 110 Nm across the family and communication via FSoE over EtherCAT. The safety functions are not a separate module: safe torque off, safe brake control and safely limited speed run in the drive itself and are certified to SIL3 / PLe Cat. 3.

Why humanoids need a different kind of safety

Classical industrial safety assumes that removing power brings a machine to a safe state. A humanoid is an inverted pendulum: cut the torque and it falls. POSITRON Safety AI addresses this at system level, with multi-axis safe motion across more than 30 axes, system-level reactions such as safe active crouch and safe guided falling, camera-based safe human detection, and semantic monitoring of the operational AI. The POSITRON STA1 compute hardware is certified to SIL3 / PLe Cat. 3 by TÜV Rheinland. The detection and behavioural layers are developed on the basis of IEC 62998, IEC 61496, ISO/IEC TR 5469 and ISO/IEC TS 22440, with certification work ongoing.

What the jury saw

The jury highlighted safe guided falling, letting a legged robot go down in a controlled way instead of simply dropping it, as a capability with no equivalent on the market today. Together with safe motion at the drive level, it is what allows a humanoid to work next to people without a cage.

Safety is not what holds humanoids back. Done properly, it is what lets them out of the cage.