Are you like me? Do you have an industrial robot sitting in your garage, and you're thinking, "Man, that thing is a pain to program." If so, read on.

Senior Research Engineer, Evan Atherton, is one of our team members. I have featured some of Evan's exploits in other blog posts.

• Autodesk Fusion 360 R2-D2 Project by Evan Atherton
• Evan and Arthur's Excellent Adventure
• WIRED: 3D Printed Speaker Cases with LED Lights

Evan recently announced the release of Mimic, an open-source Autodesk Maya plug-in for controlling Industrial Robots. For the unfamiliar, Maya is computer animation software for 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering packaged as an integrated, powerful toolset. Creatives use Maya for animation, environments, motion graphics, virtual reality, and character creation.

Mimic is a free and open-source plug-in for Autodesk Maya that enables simulation, programming, and control of 6-axis, Industrial Robots. It provides a robust and intuitive, animation-based toolset, allowing creators to prototype, validate, and drive automated systems.

Visit the Mimic site.

Autodesk has teams that work on a lot of experimental robotics projects, writing many of their own software tools from scratch. When paving the way for humans and robots working side-by-side in the future, the team found that they needed a flexible and extensible solution for working with robots from within familiar design software; and so Mimic was born.

"We built it to work for us, but we’d like to share it with you to use, change, and expand."
— Evan Atherton

As its name suggests, robots controlled by Mimic mimic the movements specified by the human using Maya. Working in Maya is way easier than specifying robot-specific control commands.

Visit us at mimicformaya.com to find out more!

Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental). Our work with robots advances our ability to continue to make this a reality for our customers.

Robots are alive in the lab.