Introducing the new Parametric Robot Control

[Johannes @ Robots in Architecture]

Hello All,

Some of you have been testing and using the new Parametric Robot Control (PRC) for a while now, so we're happy to introduce it on the forum. In a nutshell, it is our experimental cousin to KUKA|prc, but does not replace it – they can coexist nicely.

Our idea behind the new PRC is that we want to make robotics as accessible as possible, across many different environments and domains. To support this, all the core logic runs in a separate server process and communicates with clients via the web technology gRPC.

We are still huge fans of Grasshopper and therefore the Grasshopper (1 and 2!) implementations are our reference integrations, but there are also prototypes showing how PRC can be integrated into web interfaces, Blender, Fusion, Adobe software and more. Because the interfaces are well documented, AI agents can relatively easily interpret them and perform these integrations (semi) automatically.

While we call it a "Server", it is simply a single executable file with no large external dependencies (no need for ROS or other platforms) and you can run it on the same PC/Mac that you work on. Grasshopper even autostarts it for you when you drag a Core component onto the canvas.

Using PRC, we have developed workflows where Python manages the dataflow while Grasshopper handles path planning and optimization. We have also implemented our own MCP servers that allow you to simulate and check robot data coming from an LLM. You can tell that we are very excited about the possibility space opened up by PRC!

Its rewritten architecture allows us to integrate complex new features much faster and more easily - a good example of this is preliminary support for ABB, UR, Neura, and Igus code generation. It will not yet have the same level of reliability as our KUKA code, so your feedback is very much appreciated.

It runs nicely on both Windows and macOS, with a 99.9% identical feature set and UI.

We have also put together some documentation to make things easier. You can find it at prc.robotsinarchitecture.org. If you are a developer, you can take a look at the example code of the integrations on GitHub. An tutorial video for users is available on YouTube.

Regarding licensing: We do not yet have a 100% detailed plan for what features will be available in a Community Version. At the moment, some features such as support for more robot brands are only available with a license/membership. Also, the two membership management systems are not yet linked. So even if you have an existing Robots in Architecture membership, you would still need to send me an email so that I can unlock a full PRC license for you. Sorry about that - we will fix that soon.

PRC requires Rhino 8 to run, but it also worked on Rhino WIP without problems. On Windows you need Windows 10 or 11. The macOS version is built for ARM (M1 upwards) but the developer version of the server should also run on Intel Macs and even Linux - it's just .NET.

We would greatly appreciate your feedback and are already extremely curious what kind of new applications will be powered by PRC! That being said, we will keep supporting KUKA|prc, so there is no need to switch.

Best,
Johannes