05.06.2024

COMPAS Developer Day

For the first time, the COMPAS Association organised the COMPAS Developer Day at ETH Zurich. Over 100 participants from the fields of computational architecture, design and engineering had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the new version COMPAS 2.0 and try out some of the newly developed extension packages.

On 30 May, 100 people from all over the world took part in the first COMPAS Developer Day, both in person and online. Researchers from various chairs of the Institute of Technology in Architecture as well as practitioners from industry gave insights into their projects and how they use the open source computational framework COMPAS.

The afternoon was kicked off with a keynote by Tom van Mele (Block Research Group) providing a comprehensive update on the new and improved feature set of COMPAS 2.0. Oliver Bucklin (Gramazio Kohler Research) demonstrated how the COMPAS Timber extension is used in the production of the Caschlatsch demonstrator, a timber frame structure currently being built in the Swiss mountains. Li Chen (Block Research Group) showcased the COMPAS Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) extension and how it integrates into the COMPAS ecosystem. Gonzalo Casas (Gramazio Kohler Research) highlighted the COMPAS EVE extension for building distributed systems using event brokers, as well as the updates on the robotic fabrication pipeline for COMPAS including planning (COMPAS FAB), robotic control (COMPAS RRC) and the upcoming behavior trees implementation (COMPAS EMMA).

Following the researchers' updates, the event proceeded with three guest speakers from industry showcasing their COMPAS applications: Romana Rust (vyzn) illustrated how they use COMPAS for geometry processing and topological analysis and how a successful model for industry-open source collaboration can work. Inés Ariza (Mesh AG) explained the integration of COMPAS RRC into their industrial automation as well as their approach to XR assembly. Lastly, Vasilis Aloutsanidis (Vaulted AG) outlined their COMPAS-based integrated development workflows for the Rippmann Floor System (RFS).

The final segment of the afternoon was dedicated to teasing soon-to-be-released extensions and future developments: Katerina Toumpektsi (Gramazio Kohler Research) introduced the COMPAS Tile Design extension for robotic tiling, Joseph Kenny (Gramazio Kohler Research) revealed glimpses of the COMPAS XR extensions to be launched on June 27th, and Adam Anouar (Gramazio Kohler Research) described a COMPAS-based extension for designing brick walls, titled COMPAS Brick Design, a homage to the original Brick Design 1.0 rhino plugin released by researchers of the same team almost a decade ago.

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