Technical article: Developing a robot model using system-level design

What was once the stuff of dreams, being secretly developed in high-security government labs for applications in defence 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 organisations across the world.

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 analysed using the symbolic computation engine within Maple.