What was once the stuff of dreams, being secretly developed in high-security government labs for applications in defense and space exploration, is now a pervasive and integral part of our lives. Today, robots assemble products in factories, wash our cars, vacuum our homes, and come in a wide range of sizes, designs and capabilities. No longer confined to top-secret government labs, robots are now being developed by private organizations across the world.
These organizations require tools that can not only handle the technical complexities involved in designing and building a robot, but also mitigate the long timescales and high costs often associated with this endeavor. With MapleSim, the multidomain system modeling and simulation platform from Maplesoft, organizations can:
- Develop and test virtual prototypes of their robotics systems
- Reduce their development costs
- Get a time-to-market advantage by shortening their project timescales
This paper uses NAO, the humanoid robot from Aldebaran Systems, to demonstrate how MapleSim can be used to develop a robot model, and how the model can be further analyzed using the symbolic computation engine within Maple.
