My research at the Interactive Machines Lab (Florida Atlantic University) looks at how designers, artists and students can work with industrial robots without specialist training. I build open-source tools that bring robot control, sensors and fabrication into Blender, and test them in workshops and fabrication projects.
Publications
Procedural Animation for Intuitive Industrial Robot Programming
Luis Arturo Pacheco Alcala, Madeline Gannon, Shahin Vassigh · SIGraDi 2025: Meta Responsive Approaches, Córdoba, Argentina · pp. 1075–1086
Proposes procedural animation as a way to program industrial robots: the user describes high-level actions and the system resolves the low-level constraints. A workflow links Blender’s animation tools to robot control through visual programming, so robot motion is animated instead of written as toolpaths.
Paper (PDF) · DOI · Lab page
Animaquina
Luis Pacheco · ACADIA 2024: Designing Change, Calgary, Canada · pp. 591–600
Introduces Animaquina, a toolkit to make architectural robotics more accessible through two ideas: interactive toolpathing, and a modular wireless hardware framework for integrating sensors, actuators and end-effectors. The paper shows the workflow through robotic 3D printing and outlines Animaquina’s roadmap as an open-source platform.
BIRT: An Open-Source Integration Toolkit for Architectural Robotics
Luis Pacheco · SIGraDi 2023: Accelerated Landscapes, Punta del Este, Uruguay · pp. 19–29
Presents the Blender Interactive Robot Control Tool (BIRT), an open-source toolkit that combines the precision of offline programming with the adaptability of online programming. It has a Blender interface, a Python communication layer and an IoT hardware layer for connecting sensors and actuators.
Open-source tools
- Animaquina: a Blender add-on for controlling and simulating industrial robot arms. GitHub
- FabNodes: an ecosystem of networked hardware nodes (sensors, actuators, end-effectors) that talk over MQTT. GitHub