Getting Started
This section provides a guide on how to get started with robotic fabrication. It will guide you through setting up the required software, as well as some basic exercises. This guide is completely digital, and won't require a physical robot. Once finished, you can proceed to use a physical robot or continue with the simulated robot.
This guide will focus on the UR10e Robot. Additional steps will be provided to set up the ABB robots as well.
We use a variety of different software packs in the Robotics Lab. Here is a list of some of the software we use and the requirements.
Software | Purpose | Requirements |
​Rhino & Grasshopper​ | Fabrication and Programming Environment | Windows, Rhino 6 |
​Robots Plugin​ | Programming Plugin for Grasshopper | Windows*, Rhino 6 |
​ABB Robot Studio​ | Programming & Simulation Environment for ABB Robots | Windows |
​URSim​ | Simulation Environment for UR Robots. | Windows or Linux |
​Isaac Sim​ | Advanced Simulation Environment | Linux, AWS |
​Unreal Engine​ | Advanced/Collaborative Environment | Windows |
*Robots is on MacOSX now, however many of the plugins we use in our scripts do not work on mac. We recommend using Windows.
For the purposes of this getting started guide, we will work with Rhino & Grasshopper, and the Robots plugin. Together this software gives you the ability to program and run basic simulations for all the robots available in the Robotics Lab.