Using software for structural analysis is a necessity nowadays for every professional Civil/Structural engineer to deliver safe and sustainable designs. The demand by clients to deliver more economical structures, engineers are required to be able to perform complex, sophisticated and difficult analysis types as well as validate the results. While an engineer needs to be competent to perform the task, the tool he is using e.g. analytical software needs to be flawless, free from errors, therefore reliable. It is clear that unsupported and undeveloped software cannot be considered by a responsible professional engineer as a reliable tool but if used may lead to a structure failure or even catastrophe involving human lose.

As we are professional engineers with extensive experience in structures design (buildings, bridges etc.) and higher education, we managed to learn how to use advanced analysis software solvers as well as we developed abilities to validate the results.

Most of us have an experience with various softwares but Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis Professional (RSA) became the only software that we love for what it is and can be used for. To us, users, the concept on which Robot was developed places this software beyond the rest, it is unique. We believe that keeping its magic and implementing a serious development plan, Robot can easily become a leading structural engineering software in the market worldwide and thousands of engineers will turn to use.

Recently, we have noticed that Autodesk has very little interest in Robot maintenance and further development regardless users strong commitments, and even we heard in the network session that there is a possibility to terminate it completely, we have serious commercial concerns which may affect us and Autodesk.

Having all stated above in mind, we are here to stand to defence Robot, our beloved software, we would like to convince Autodesk to change its mind regarding Robot’s future. As we are loyal and responsible user, we are eager to share the risk and responsibilities in future and therefore would like to propose an efficient plan for Robot:

1. Treat Robot as an individual software not related to any collections only, assign special development team, product manager, quality assurance etc. and o set new price for Robot and its subscriptions fees based on reasonable judgment of the users numbers compared to another software’s .
2. Autodesk to assign a dedicated team to implement new ideas, required feature,   improvements and to host discussion sessions between users and developers.
3. Autodesk to approve a certification scheme for Robot as certified user and certified professional.
4. We, users, commit ourselves to spread RSA technology around the world i.e. marketing by recommendation and also work seriously with Autodesk to increase Robot’s users quantity as much as we can.