Morning All,
I am sure you have been asked this many time but I figure the more we ask, the more likely it is to happen!
We have been using Robot for about 6 months now and are impressed with its analysis and design capabilities albeit the user interface leave a fair bit to be desired. That said, we would prioritise program functionality over user friendliness any day!
All said an done, there are a few features that seem to be available in when European settings are used but are not available when using Australian settings. Note that we still are not 100% across everything that robot does and does not do to Australian Standards but as of now, we noted that it does not support the following:
- Wind load generation to AS 1170.2
- Steel connection design to AS 4100. We also notice that certain buckling parameter calculations that have an automatic mode available to them when using the BS EN 1993 settings are not available in the AS 4100 setting along with other lesser used features such as we bearing, buckling and stiffener design.
- Foundation design to AS 3600
- Geotechnical design although the Australian Standards are in general particularly poor in this regard. For example there is no direct equivalent to BS 8004/BS-EN 1997 and AS 3600 also does not explicitly cover geotechnical structures in a similar manner to BS 8110. The only Australian Standards that I am aware of that cover foundations are AS 2870 which is for residential rafts and footings and mostly covers how to deal with footing design for lightweight structures constructed on reactive clay sites and AS 2159 which is for piles and tells you little more than the pile capacity needs to be greater than the applied loads but provide no methods to actually calculate the pile capacity.
As of now, we simply use the Eurocode settings for these elements and do a proving calculation using either manual methods or other programs (e.g. Tekla TEDDS) just to satisfy building regulation requirements. However, as with anything, this is an extra time and cost for us so it would be really great if we could do the whole lot in Robot as we like everyone else in the industry would love a proper, fully integrated BIM analysis/design/document system and every time we need to divert onto a tangent from that workflow takes from the efficiency of this process.
