How Serious are Autodesk about Developing and Continually Improving Robot

[anthonymctigue]

Morning All,

I have been using Robot since Version 2017.  I work a lot with older buildings and have spent a lot of time and resources developing workflows and methods that allows me to use Robot to effectively do this albeit some of it using workflows that are not optimal from a IT perspective but are reliable from a structural analysis/design perspective.

My overall experiece with it is that it is a powerful and useful tool but it is a real ugly duckling in terms of the workflows, user interface and supporting documentation.  Having used it regularly, it's impossible to not acknowledge that in that time, very little has changed particularly when you compare it to Revit and even AutoCAD when you see just how much those programs have evolved in that time.  The only major improvement I can recall was enabling of Dynamo in Robot 3 or so versions ago albeit with very limited capabilities and little has evolved since then. 

Recently, I have been working a lot with analytical modelling in Revit and interoperating it with Robot and though it technically can be described as 'working', the results are far from impressive or even remotely reliable.  I often have extreme difficulty charing even the most basic information with any degree of reliability.  Common themes are mapping member cross sections from Revit families to Robot databases, grid lines ending up on multiple different grid systems in Robot, multiple, duplicated load cases and recently discovered that for some unknown reason, the model generated in Robot comes in at a different location in space than the equivalent Revit model.  The reverse is even less reliable when shending Robot results back to Revit to the point where I simply don't use it and opt to make changes in Revit and then re-export to Robot rather than risk stuffing up the Revit model and even this oly goes so far as there are tasks that simply cannot be carried out in Revit.

I am getting really frustrated with the apparent lack of progress on the software front in terms of reliable, consistent, transparent and easy to use BIM workflows for structural engineering.  It now is nearly 17 years since I first heard the term BIM and beack as far as 2004 when I first worked as an engineer using AutoCAD in a design office to draw stick dragrams representing framing and wondered to myself how good it would be if I could also use it to calculate bending moment diagrams and carry out beam capacity checks and yet, in 2023, we still are in a position where two pieces of software from the same company are incapable of reliably sharing even the most basic information such as where stuff is, what is is, what size it is and what material it is made of let alone anything complex such as what loads are on it, how heavily stressed it is or wll it buckle.  I often encounter the accusation that I work in the most conservative industry in the world that relies on backwards workflows yet those who accuse this industry of that seem to have a massive disconnect as to just how hard it is to work with the products they put out and to get them to reliably do what needs to be done for us use them to solve the real world problems we face. 

I really want to continue to use Robot as I believe that inside of it along with the ease with which Revit can generate geometry, analytical models, structural loads and everything else it is capable of along with the powerful options Dynamo gives you that there is massive potential for it or some replacement product in the Autodesk lineup to become the go to in the industry the same way Revit is and AutoCAD was.  However, I would like to know that somewhere in Autodesk, there is someone working on this and taking its development seriously.  I remember there was massive excitment when the pre-release version of a product called React was released, however this project never seemed to evolve and eventually, all references to it disappeared from the Autodesk website.  It's also impossible to not notice that many of the most popular ideas on this form date from as far back as 2012 and appear to still have not been enacted upon, many of the design standards are superseeded or obsolete versions and when you post to the forums, if you get a response from Autodesk, it's usually one of about three people which indicates to me that few if anyone is actively working on developing and improving Robot.

[leal]

@anthonymctigue 

It is very good to read about ROBOT. The comment received from @steinryan28 one year ago shows a false reality of Autodesk interest in developing ROBOT. There is two main problems that need special attention from AUTODESK. The first one is the user interface. There is no diference between versions 2023 and 2025. Every year I stop trying to understand ROBOT to put it working. Loosed time.  The user interface is not friendly and dificult to inderstand. The icons are not organized in a logical way. The second is interface with ROBOT. There is a lot of things that we do in REVIT that ROBOT does not accept. For example. Consider a Column. When we are working with physical model we define the columns in the ground floor - the first one - with a diference of say 300 mm down to connect the spread or block of the fundation. If you send it to ROBOT like that, the answer is that the column is not associated to any level and stops. You receive this or other problem answers and there is no way to obtain an information about these issues. When an error advise appears, in would be important that we have access to an explanation through F1 or any other way. This is only a small problem, And the stairs? And send back the model to REVIT ... and so ... and so. The creation of the analytical model in REVIT is much better now. But it is not enough. I still think that Autodesk is playing a joke with us, the costumers that are paying, waiting that Autodesk use their resources to seriously develop ROBOT.  I serious believe that IA and machine learning will be a serious jump to get an efficient structural analysis software, for analysis, design and documentation. Autodesk announces something about this. But we never know if they are really working on that. In the meanwhile ROBOT is only occupying space in our SSD's.

Carlos Leal