Future Workflows for Robotic Fabrication
Autodesk’s Heather Kerrick shows us new, intuitive ways to interface with automation
The field of robotics has come a long way over the last half century, but while robots have found an important role in many industrial contexts, they have always required the skills of trained roboticists to write the code that explicitly defines each task. Heather Kerrick and her colleagues in the Autodesk Robotics Lab are looking for new, more intuitive ways to interact with automation. She shares how colleagues in Birmingham, England are using Slack, a cloud-based collaboration and chat platform, to communicate with their robots. And she describes how she’s used her team’s Mimic plug-in for Maya to build the CAD-Informed Robotic Assembly (CIRA) tool to enable robots to assemble products from an exploded 3D model. At the end of the day, most people are interested in getting a task done, not learning how to program a robot. Kerrick and her team are making that possible.
About the speaker
Heather Kerrick is a senior research engineer in the Autodesk Robotics Lab. She has been with Autodesk for 4 years and is currently exploring where industrial robotics can go next, with a special focus on systems-level issues. She holds a Master of Science in Engineering degree from Stanford University.
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