How it started

Founded by Albert Nubiola in January 2015, RoboDK is a spin-off company from the CoRo laboratory at ETS University in Montreal, Canada, one of the most prestigious robotics labs in Canada.

RoboDK launched when the first customer, a New Zealand-based manufacturer, wanted to use RoboDK to calibrate an ABB robot for robot milling.

Evolution

At launch, the RoboDK library supported 200 robots from more than 20 robot manufacturers. RoboDK has grown quickly and is now used by companies of all sizes from startups to the world's largest corporations.

RoboDK now offers an extensive library of over 1000 robots from 50 robot manufacturers. RoboDK is currently based in Canada and Europe and has more than 50 partners around the world. RoboDK has thousands of active users.

NASA

In 2017, a team at NASA's Langley Research Center, in Virginia, USA, was tasked with developing an automated inspection system for composite aircraft fuselages.

The researchers settled on a cobot-based solution using a UR10 from Universal Robots and RoboDK software for simulation and offline programming.

In 2019, building on the success of the original project, NASA unveiled a multi-robot inspection system that uses two synchronized cobots to perform line scan tomography inspections on aircraft fuselages.

Designed to facilitate multi-software workflows, RoboDK software enabled the researchers to synchronize 2 robots and incorporate external axes into their simulations.

Aircraft

Wilder Systems, an automation supplier based in Austin, Texas, USA, developed the first robotic "drive-thru" washing system for aircraft, using RoboDK for robot simulation and programming purposes.

The hardware includes two Fanuc 6-axis robot arms, each mounted on a linear axis and synchronized using a PLC.

A custom post processor was used to allow the synchronization of both robots.

Compared to the 16 person-hours of the manual washing process, this system uses robots instead of people and the entire washing cycle is completed in just 52 minutes. If a person needed to oversee the robot, this would be a time saving of 95%.