Robots

PAACADEMY provides online courses on the open-source Robots plugin for Grasshopper, teaching designers how to program multi-brand industrial robot arms directly from parametric geometries.

Robots is an open-source Grasshopper plugin for programming industrial robotic arms from the parametric design environment. Unlike robot-manufacturer-specific plugins (such as KUKA|prc which is strictly for KUKA arms), Robots supports multiple robot brands and models, providing a unified Grasshopper interface for generating robot programs compatible with KUKA, ABB, UR (Universal Robots), Staubli, and other industrial hardware.

At PAACADEMY, the Robots plugin is utilized in fabrication courses like Clay 3D-Printing: Beyond Digital Design by Edurne Morales, emphasizing its versatility in mixed-hardware laboratory environments:

• Multi-Brand Flexibility: Learning a single Grasshopper interface that can output code for different robot brands without requiring proprietary software.
• Kinematic Simulation: Previewing the robotic arm's movement in the Rhino viewport to test for reachability and avoid physical collisions.
• Custom Fabrication: Driving complex end-effectors for processes like clay extrusion, giving designers total control over layer heights, speed and orientation.