Robotics
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I've spent most of this week in Amsterdam with colleagues from the Toronto office. Our group descended on the MX3D offices in the funky NDSM wharf area of the city, to make a big push and help get the world's first robotically 3D-printed steel bridge – and its supporting systems – ready for Dutch Design Week. Most of the team stayed in a hotel right next to MX3D, but we did get the chance to take the ferry across to "the mainland" (it isn't really: everything is connected, it just seems that way) from time to time. It was really…
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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 current…
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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 issues…
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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 as…
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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 30…
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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. 😉 This…
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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 you…
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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 passes…
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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 an…
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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 to…