Fast Company goes inside Autodesk’s robotics lab of the future #robotics
Fast Company has an exclusive look at Autodesk’s robotics lab of the future! Check out the full piece for photos and more.
In the middle of a tall, wide, two-story workspace with black walls and a conference room built inside an orange shipping container, three industrial robots are sitting idle.
Two of them are identical, yellow FANUCs, from Japan, the kind typically used in car manufacturing or for “pick-and-place” tasks. They’re called Castor and Pollux, after twin brothers from Greek and Roman mythology. Here, inside one of the many nearly identical maritime buildings that line San Francisco’s downtown waterfront, without a car to build or a warehouse full of items to pluck off shelves, they look a little out of place. As does their nearby cousin, an even bigger, orange, Swiss industrial robot from ABB that’s as yet unchristened, and a smaller device, a Universal Robotics UR10 called Bishop.
This is the Pier 9 Workshop, design software giant Autodesk’s private maker space, 27,000 square feet of wood shop, metal shop, 3-D printers, electronics, and even a commercial kitchen.
It’s also the home of Autodesk’s Applied Research Lab and, as Fast Company is the first to reveal, the company’s new Robotics Lab, which had been under wraps since February. Castor, Pollux, Bishop, and their Swiss cousin aren’t out of place at all.
With customers in nearly every major industry you can imagine, Autodesk was certainly well aware of how robots had become a mature business technology over the last several decades. It just hadn’t thought much about how robots will work in conjunction with software, and people, in the future. Their thinking changed about a year ago.
For Maurice Conti and his colleagues, the light-bulb moment came when they saw the technology behind the Oscar-winning special effects in Gravity.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
