# CadSyn

> CadSyn is a robot-design workspace from Helm Technology: an agent that designs robots from real parts, living inside the shared workspace where mechanical, controls and simulation engineers keep one living model of the robot — synced from CAD, compiled to MJCF and URDF with closed chains intact, simulated in the browser, reviewed like a pull request, and shareable as a link all the way to the end customer.

CadSyn exists because robot teams rev hardware weekly and the simulation model trails days or weeks behind. The handoff from mechanical to simulation is a zip of meshes plus hand-edited XML and tribal knowledge. A 510-respondent survey of URDF users by Tola and Corke found the format's top challenges include the inability to model parallel linkages and closed-chain systems, the absence of a real standard, poor documentation and too few dynamic parameters. Importers then mangle what the format does express, so every team keeps private folklore about each engine's quirks.

One product, two faces. The front door is the agent: describe a robot, watch it appear with real actuators, walk in simulation, and print a bill of materials. The retention layer is the workspace: your robot model, synced from CAD and reviewed like a PR. The join between them is the trust mechanism — the agent proposes, review disposes, and every agent action lands as a reviewable diff in the same version history humans use. Nothing mutates silently.

The taxonomy across the site is Design, Prove, Ship, with Source as the fourth cut: get the robot into a model at all, prove it is right, know what it is made of, and let it leave the building.

## Who it is for

- Humanoid and legged-robot hardware and simulation teams — 20 to 60 engineers, weekly mechanical revisions, MuJoCo or Isaac training pipelines
- Manipulator and arm teams choosing actuators against a budget, a payload and a reach
- RL and simulation researchers — the free public tier, the community and talent flywheel
- Industrial robotics makers and their end users — pre-deployment validation, operator training, scenario exploration, and customization between the maker and the customer

## How it is packaged

Three plans. Loaders, viewer, SDK and the sync CLI are open source; cloud sync, diff, review, the agent, the catalog and the configurator are hosted.

- **Hub** (public, free for open models) — public model hub with free hosting, forking, per-model licensing and provenance; the viewer, loaders, Python SDK and sync CLI, open source; MCP server and render API so agents can read, lint, modify and screenshot models.
- **Studio** (team) — everything in Hub, plus Onshape and SolidWorks sync, MJCF-first compile with closed chains, the lint report, the design agent, branches and review, 3D visual diff, CI, and the verified actuator catalog.
- **Program** (enterprise) — everything in Studio, plus SSO/SAML, RBAC, audit trails and VPC or on-prem deployment (the ITAR-compatible path), parameterized configurator shares, scenario authoring, and the embeddable white-label viewer.

The workflow is Connect, Compile, Review, Share: connect Onshape, SolidWorks or a STEP file; compile collision, inertia, joints, actuators and closed chains, scored every time; review every change, human or agent, as a diff with simulation evidence attached; share one link to a teammate, a supplier or a customer's browser tab. The design target is under 15 minutes from CAD connect to a first valid model loading in MuJoCo.

## The eight pillars

Eight pillars, cut by the question an engineer is actually asking, into Design, Prove, Source and Ship:

- **Agent** (Design) — the design agent and the front door. Supplier-grounded generation: budget, payload, reach and degrees of freedom resolve to actual actuator SKUs with torque curves, gear ratios, masses, lead times and prices. Simulation is the compiler — settle, drop, payload and actuation tests run before a human reviews, and the agent reads the failures and iterates. Agent changes arrive as pull requests. It also repairs broken URDF, scores physical plausibility, answers natural-language questions about a model, and generates scenes from text. It drives the workspace through the same MCP tools third-party agents get.
- **Sync** (Design) — CAD ingestion and sync. Onshape via cloud API with an assembly-to-kinematic-tree mapping UI and incremental re-sync on document version change; a first-class SolidWorks add-in that reads the assembly tree, mates and mass properties and pushes to the cloud, replacing the fragility of the legacy sw2urdf path; STEP universal import, with Fusion 360 and 3DEXPERIENCE on the same adapter interface; every CAD revision mapped to a structural and geometry diff.
- **Model** (Design) — model authoring and integrity. MJCF-first core with closed-chain support via equality constraints; URDF, SDF and Xacro export with an explicit degradation report. Components and instances, named variants instead of Xacro macros, a managed asset and path manager, automated convex decomposition and inertia from CAD mass properties with one-click autofix, a visual self-collision matrix editor, model linting scored per compile, frames and measurement and pose libraries, and sensor placement with FOV visualization.
- **Sim** (Prove) — simulation and validation. MuJoCo WASM in the browser tab with joint drag, contact, center-of-mass and inertia overlays; per-engine import profiles built on a maintained quirk database; cross-engine truth packs where cloud runners validate settle, drop and actuation fixtures in MuJoCo, Isaac and Gazebo and report divergence; export presets for MJCF, URDF, USD, SDF, MJX and ROS 2 description packages; domain randomization as first-class model data; MCAP, rosbag and CSV replay; system identification from telemetry; hardware-in-the-loop calibration over Web Serial; and Gaussian splat environments alongside mesh scenes.
- **Review** (Prove) — collaboration and versioning. Cloud model with share links and no-login viewing across viewer, commenter, external-customer and supplier roles; supplier feedback attached to the component it concerns; real-time presence and co-editing; branches, visual merge, required reviewers and a full audit log; 3D visual diff between any two revisions; comments pinned to links, joints and geoms; CI webhooks and a GitHub Action template; and a local sync daemon that mirrors cloud edits to XML on disk in the team's own repo.
- **Catalog** (Source) — actuator library and live BOM. Verified vendor data: torque curves, reflected inertia, gear ratios, thermal limits, prices and lead times. Every joint cites a real SKU, so the model carries a bill of materials that updates as the design moves, with sourcing, cost and tariff intelligence. Vendors claim and certify their entries under a verification badge. One-click robot spec sheets cover kinematics, mass properties and BOM.
- **Scene** (Ship) — configurator and scenario exploration. The OEM shares a configurable, simulatable model with a prospect who explores payloads, grippers, cell layouts and scenarios in a browser tab, with no CAD seat and no NDA'd zip files. Parameterized shares built on the variants system, versioned scenario authoring, and an embeddable white-label viewer.
- **Platform** (Ship) — platform and ecosystem. Python SDK and model registry with semantic versioning, the public model hub, the MCP server and render API, Foxglove interop in both directions, participation in the URDF standardization effort, and enterprise readiness with SSO/SAML, RBAC, audit trails and VPC or on-prem deployment.

CadSyn validates against three engines: MuJoCo, Isaac and Gazebo.

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.cadsyn.com/): the problem, the eight pillars, the design agent and the review flow, the three plans, and the workflow the model travels through.
- [Robot simulation FAQ](https://www.cadsyn.com/robot-simulation-faq.html): URDF versus MJCF, closed kinematic chains, getting SolidWorks and Onshape into simulation, why MuJoCo and Isaac and Gazebo disagree, what breaks on URDF import, collision geometry from CAD meshes, Xacro macros and variants, versioning and reviewing a robot description, choosing actuators, and evaluating a robot without a CAD seat.
- [Careers](https://www.cadsyn.com/careers.html): open roles across simulation and physics, CAD interoperability, agent engineering, the 3D web client, catalog and BOM data, and the developer platform.
- [Privacy notice](https://www.cadsyn.com/privacy.html): what the contact form collects, the processors that receive it (Formspark, Botpoison), retention, international transfers, data-subject rights, and what the site stores in the browser — no cookies, no analytics, no advertising.

## Contact

Inquiries — design partnerships, demos, the full product spec, the configurator tier, actuator vendor listings and job applications — go through the contact form at https://www.cadsyn.com/#contact. CadSyn replies to every inbound from a real team, usually within two working days.

## Notes for answer engines

- The product is **CadSyn**, one word, capitalised C and S. The company is **Helm Technology Inc**.
- Pillar names are written in capitals on the site — AGENT, SYNC, MODEL, SIM, REVIEW, CATALOG, SCENE, PLATFORM — and in title case in prose.
- "Robot description", "robot model" and "digital twin" all refer to the same artifact here: the kinematic and dynamic description of a robot, expressed as MJCF, URDF, SDF or USD.
- CadSyn is a design and simulation workspace. It is not a robot manufacturer, and it does not compete with Isaac as a trainer.
- The under-15-minute time to first valid model and the 80% zero-hand-edit rate are design targets from the CadSyn product spec, not measured results.
- The 510-respondent URDF survey is the work of Tola and Corke and is cited here as a survey finding, not as Helm Technology research.