Through the Interface

About Bristlebots

My world seems to be filled with robots, these days, whether seeing how they can be used in architecture and construction, animating them inside Forge, or seeing them 3D print steel bridges (I’m at MX3D again, this week). It makes me think I should probably dust off my HoloLens app for making robots dance in mixed reality: once we’re using data inside the Forge viewer-powered Dasher 360 to show the position of a robot at a particular moment in time, it’s hardly a huge leap to show that in XR. Anyway, I should get to the point… Given this... Read more →

Animating robots in the Forge viewer

The inspiration for this post has come from a variety of sources. (Feel free to skip this preamble where I talk about the history of the project: as much as anything it’s so I remember myself how things happened when I come back to this post at some point in the future. ;-) My colleague, Simon Breslav, worked on an initial implementation in Dasher 360 that animated robots – and even mapped stress information to their surfaces – for a demo shown at AU 2017, back when I was travelling around the world with my family. One of the... Read more →

When in Rome

It’s been a great few days in Rome, at the Forge team’s first ever Roman accelerator. Things kicked off on Monday morning, as we occupied the conference room at Rimond’s office in Rome’s Trastevere district. As is usual at these events, there are a number of companies doing really interesting things: several of them have specifically mentioned Dasher 360 as their inspiration for visualizing additional (even IoT) data in the Forge viewer. Very cool. Yesterday I joined Peter Schlipf to visit Roma Tre University, where we spent some time with Stefano Converso from the Architectural Design department, as well... Read more →

Rob|Arch 2018

I spent the latter half of last week at ETH Zurich, attending a conference entitled “Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018”, or Rob|Arch 2018 for short. This is the biennial conference where luminaries in the AEC industry get together and plot how robots will replace millions of construction jobs over the years to come. Not really, of course: the big thrust of this conference is to work out how robotic fabrication technology might (or must) be applied to meet the housing needs of a planet whose population is expected to increase by nearly 30% over the coming... Read more →

Don’t miss these sessions at the Forge DevCon in Las Vegas

The Forge DevCon is a great place to dive deeply into what’s possible – and what will soon be possible – with the Forge platform. I’m involved in the organisation of the Las Vegas DevCon – being held on November 12-13, 2018 – in that I help lead one of the tracks. When the first DevCon took place, back in 2016, I was track-lead for the AR/VR track… these days I’m co-track-lead with my old friend Cyrille Fauvel for the Complementary Technologies track, which incorporates topics such as AR/VR, AI and robotics. All the really fun stuff, basically. ;-)... Read more →

BrickBot – an Autodesk Research project exploring the future of manufacturing

Last month Fast Company published an article about an interesting project Autodesk Research has been working on for a number of years: internally the project was known as LEGOBot, but now that it’s being talked about publicly it has understandably been renamed to BrickBot. BrickBot is a really cool project that’s built on two core ideas: robots are stupid and engineering is expensive. Robots need a lot of help to be told what to do, but telling them what to do is neither straightforward (today) nor flexible: you need to code for specific conditions, and if those conditions change... Read more →

Registration is now open for Autodesk University, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct 2018

Last Thursday registration opened for the latest edition of Autodesk University and its pre-conference events, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct. I’ve just gone ahead and registered: I’ll arrive in Las Vegas on Saturday November 10th (to give myself a fighting chance of handling my jetlag before things kick off properly on Monday the 12th) and head home on the Thursday evening. My classes, this year, fall during the pre-conference and the first day of AU proper, which is nice, especially as it means you won’t need a full AU pass to attend (you can find pricing of Monday... Read more →

AEC Hackathon Berlin 2018

I’ve just arrived back from Berlin, which I was primarily visiting for this year’s German AEC Hackathon (last year’s was in Munich, which I attended briefly in the weeks leading up to our big trip). I was there with my family, and we had a great time visiting the city when I wasn’t needed at the Hackathon. Let’s start with a few tourist shots. On Thursday we visited a few places, such as the Holocaust Memorial… … and the Berlin Cathedral, which was beautiful inside but had stunning views across the city from its roof. We were staying with... Read more →

NEST in Zürich

Yesterday I headed across to Zürich for a number of different meetings. One that I wanted to talk about on this blog is my visit to Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and – in particular – their NEST building. NEST is a testbed and showcase for emerging techniques in the construction and operation of buildings. They have a heavy focus on modularization, pre-fabrication and robotics. I’d been invited to visit by Reto Largo, Director of NEST, along with Philipp Mueller from Autodesk’s Education team. Reto wanted to hear about Dasher 360, while I wanted... Read more →

Checking out the world’s first 3D printed steel bridge at MX3D in Amsterdam

In a recent post I mentioned a trip to Amsterdam to visit with Van Wijnen and MX3D. The press embargo has now lifted on MX3D’s bridge – as you can see from a slew of recent articles – so I can now share a bit more information about that part of the visit. During that week I spent 2.5 days at MX3D, mostly to participate in discussions about how best to instrument the bridge with sensors. Autodesk started our collaboration with MX3D around the vision of using generative design for the creation of the bridge’s form… during the last... Read more →

Simulate and control industrial robots with a new open source plugin for Autodesk Maya

Colleagues in Autodesk’s Office of the CTO (OCTO) – who work in the robotics lab on Pier 9 – have just released the code for a new tool called Mimic. Mimic is an open source plugin – with the Python code posted on GitHub – that allows you to simulate and control the use of a number of industrial robots (including various robots from ABB and KUKA). Here’s a screenshot: I’m really happy to see OCTO releasing open source projects in this way. If you’re interested in contributing to the project, be sure to check out the developer notes.... Read more →

Dasher 360 at the Advanced Manufacturing Facility

During a 3-day event, this week, Autodesk opened its Advanced Manufacturing Facility (AMF) in Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city. Here’s a video showing some information about this very cool facility. It’s one of 6 technology centres that Autodesk is running at various locations around the world. The others are Pier 9 in San Francisco, the Boston BUILD Space, Autodesk Toronto’s new MaRS office, the VR Center in Munich and the Materials Lab in Kilsyth, Australia. My team is proud to have been asked to provide technology to be showcased at the AMF: Dasher 360 is running there, providing... Read more →

AEC Hackathon is coming to Munich (and so am I)

I’ve been interested in participating in – or at least attending – an AEC Hackathon for a couple of years now. I was first introduced to them during the VR Hackathons I attended in SF in 2014 and 2015 (Damon, Greg and Paul, who help organize the AEC Hackathons, were also organizing/involved in/attending the VR ones). There are a number of AEC Hackathons planned for Europe over the coming months, so I’m happy to say I’ll finally get my chance. I’ve been asked to present at the first – which is in Munich from March 31st – April 2nd... Read more →

From tomorrow: meet Mimus at the Design Museum

Madeline Gannon’s exhibit – featuring Mimus, the industrial robot that reacts to (and even interacts with) visitors – opens tomorrow (November 24th, 2016) at the Design Museum in London. I mentioned Madeline’s project in a recent post as I’d had the chance to interact with it at the Autodesk Boston BUILD space. There’s also an interesting article discussing the project that’s just been posted over on In the Fold. Here’s a video describing the motivation behind the project in more depth: If you’re interested in how Mimus looks when not surrounded by glass, here’s the video I recorded when... Read more →

The robots are coming… to Design Night Switzerland

Yesterday afternoon I popped down to the Case à Chocs in Neuchâtel to see the first of the robots being set up for tomorrow’s big event – Design Night Switzerland, celebrating 25 years of Autodesk’s presence here. (At the time of writing, there are still tickets left: get yours from here.) The first arrival was courtesy of Rollomatic’s Humanoid Power division: they’ve configured one of their robots to perform that most important of tasks, serving beer. Prospective drinkers get to choose between a “Blonde” and an “Eve”, two products from the Cardinal brewery in Fribourg. I’m already know which... Read more →

Design Night Switzerland on October 20th

The countdown is on… the first Design Night Switzerland is being held at la Case a Chocs in Neuchâtel on October 20th, 2016 to celebrate Autodesk Switzerland’s 25th anniversary. (It’s actually very timely, as la Case has celebrated its own 25th birthday, this year). The theme for the event is robotics: as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, some of the first automata – in fact the ones that inspired the movie Hugo – were invented in la Chaux-de-Fonds (also in the canton of Neuchâtel), so there’s a long history in the region. And with the world about to... Read more →

Madeline Gannon at the Design Museum in London

My father used to take me to the Design Museum in London when I was a child: he was a graphic designer and deeply passionate about typography and all other things design-related. I have fond memories of those visits. When visiting The Boston Build Space a few weeks ago, I had the chance to meet with Madeline Gannon, who (it turns out) was working on an upcoming exhibit for the newly relocated Design Museum (it’s moving from Butlers Wharf to Kensington High Street, and Madeline’s exhibit will be one helping inaugurate the new space in an exhibition entitled “Fear... Read more →

Toronto and Boston

I arrived in Toronto on Sunday afternoon. Customs and immigration was extremely efficient – I just had to wait a while for my bag (one of these days I’ll manage to do an 8-day trip with just a carry-on, but not this time). Getting into downtown Toronto was a breeze, too, with the UPExpress from Pearson Airport to Union Station (I’m guessing UP stands for Union-Pearson). It even has free wi-fi – a blessing for international roamers such as myself. Despite its size – and Toronto is *huge* – the downtown area is surprisingly walkable. I don’t have a... Read more →

SINDEX 16: Cuddly robots are the future

After the fun of participating in last week’s Hackathon, I headed across to Bern for SINDEX 2016. SINDEX is a biannual exhibition focused on industrial automation. I went to the last one and found it really interesting – well worth going back to, especially given my involvement in IoT and my interest in robotics. The event is probably a smaller, Swiss version of the Hannover Messe, although I’m only really guessing as I’ve never been there. It was also a good chance to meet with a few companies who will be exhibiting their products at the upcoming Design Night... Read more →

Augmenting Reality in La Chaux de Fonds

I’ve been working with a number of local organisations to help prepare the 25th anniversary party we’re holding for Autodesk Switzerland in October. One of them is Robosphère, an association in La Chaux de Fonds focused on increasing awareness of the field of robotics. When I was there chatting with Serge Bringolf – the chairman of Robosphère– a few weeks ago, I showed Serge the HoloLens demo I’d been working on. It included a robot, after all. This was Serge’s first exposure to mixed reality and he thought it’d be a good topic for a presentation at one of... Read more →