Spin-off company from the prestigious CoRo laboratory at ETS University in Montreal, Canada, RoboDK, has celebrated five years of evolution in the industry, growing its customer base to now include more than 30,000 active users across 15 countries.

Founded in 2015, the software is designed to bring powerful robotics simulation and programming capabilities to companies of ranging sizes and both to coders and non-coders alike.

"In 2015, traditional simulation software cost almost as much as an industrial robot. RoboDK was founded to bring affordable, state of the art simulation and robot programming software to all," said RoboDK co-founder and Chief Executive, Albert Nubiola.

Catering to an evolving market

The industrial robotics landscape is fast-moving and new robots and new original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) emerge each year.

The RoboDK API (application program interface) is a universal robot programming language that enables software developers and integrators to create advanced, non-brand specific robot programs and deploy their solutions on any robot controller.

Co-founder and Director of Marketing, Lauren Ierullo, said that keeping pace with the constantly evolving world of industrial robots and OEMs is one of RoboDK's main missions.

"RoboDK is designed to enable companies to simulate and program any robot with one piece of software at an affordable price. Keeping that promise to our customers means that we regularly update our software library to incorporate the latest industrial robot technologies," Ms Ierullo said.

When first launched, RoboDK's software library supported 200 robots from more than 20 robot manufacturers. Today, it supports more than 500 robots from 50 manufacturers, including ABB, Fanuc, KUKA, Yaskawa, Stäubli and Universal Robots.

Five years of evolution

RoboDK’s first customer was a New Zealand-based manufacturer that used RoboDK to calibrate an ABB robot for robot milling in 2015.

Since then, RoboDK has worked closely with partners and customers to enhance its offering and it now has more than 30,000 active users across 15 countries.

Keeping its software library up-to-date with the latest industrial robots is just one part of the company's offering, said Mr Nubiola.

RoboDK software now comes with 15 different types of robot application examples, from robot milling, pick and place, and polishing. It also offers plugins for CAD/CAM software.

Users can easily program industrial robots with CAD to robot simulations, directly from SolidWorks, Mastercam, Autodesk Inventor, Fusion 360 or Rhino.

RoboDK's ability to support a wide range of industrial robots is made possible by an extensive network of more than 50 partnerships with leading robot and OEM makers such as API, Creaform and IDEC.

“As industrial robotics evolves, so does RoboDK. We want to empower our customers with the latest post processors, calibration tools and essential plugins and all at a cost that's several times lower than that of our competitors,” said Mr Nubiola.

RoboDK 3.0 was launched in 2017, and a year later it added four plugins and an automated robot drilling functionality. In 2019, RoboDK added automatic collision avoidance, virtual reality capabilities and an Integrated VSCode extension for improved code visualisation.

As of 2020, RoboDK is available on Android, iOS and Raspberry, becoming the only robot simulation and programming software to support full simulation capabilities on mobile platforms.

Customer success stories

RoboDK has worked with the likes of NASA and Spotify. In 2017, a team at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Virginia, US, was tasked with developing an automated inspection system for composite aircraft fuselages.

The researchers decided on a cobot-based solution using a UR10 from Universal Robots and RoboDK software for offline programming and simulation, including the use of simulated inspection patterns to maximize path efficiency.

NASA then unveiled a multi-robot system that uses two synchronized cobots to perform line scan tomography inspections on aircraft fuselages in 2019. Designed to facilitate multi-software workflows, RoboDK software enabled the researchers to synchronize two robots and incorporate external axes into their simulations for their next project.

And when New York-based art and digital fabrication studio, Neoset Designs, was asked to collaborate with music streaming service Spotify on the 'RapCaviar Pantheon' robot sculpting project, they turned to RoboDK. Using RoboDK's robotic milling features, the team managed to complete three large sculptures of outstanding rap artists in just 15 days.

Next steps

Pushed forward by customer success stories, RoboDK expects to grow in line with the industrial robot market.

“To ensure the satisfaction of new and existing users, we plan to continue offering new applications and plugins and further extending RoboDK's robot library,” Ms Ierullo said.

The firm also plans to increase its international reach over the next few years, said Mr Nubiola.

“With the help of our distributor network, we plan to offer RoboDK software on all 6 continents. And, above all, RoboDK wants to continue inspiring and helping people around the world with their robotics projects so that they have more success stories to share.”