NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory begins widespread adoption of Maplesoft technology

MapleSim and Maple to enhance modeling and simulation in space exploration projects

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is implementing Maple, MapleSim, and MapleNet in its various projects. Whether creating America's first satellite, Explorer 1, sending the first robotic craft to the moon, or exploring the edges of the solar system, JPL has been at the forefront of pushing the limits of exploration.

Curiosity, JPL’s latest space rover, launched at the end of November, aims to explore Mars to investigate whether the planet could have ever supported microbial life. Current JPL projects include spacecraft missions to comets, asteroids and the edge of the solar system, as well as satellites that monitor the land, oceans, and atmosphere of our own planet.

Maplesoft products are expected to help JPL save time and reduce cost by providing more efficient and smarter methods for mathematical analysis, modeling, and simulation. Maplesoft solutions are built within a natively symbolic framework, avoiding some of the worst sources of error and computational inefficiencies generated by traditional, numeric-based tools – thus providing great tools for precision-rich projects such as those of JPL.

In addition to using Maple for advanced mathematical analysis, JPL will use MapleSim, Maplesoft’s high-performance physical modeling and simulation platform, as a key tool in its engineering workflow. MapleSim works in combination with Maple. It accesses Maple’s symbolic computation technology to efficiently handle all of the complex mathematics involved in the development of engineering models, including multi-domain systems, multibody systems, plant modeling, and control design.

To read the full press release, click here.

NASA Tech Briefs Webinar: High-Fidelity Physical Modeling for Aerospace Mechatronics Applications

The concepts of physical modeling have long been a key aspect of engineering in aerospace companies. Indeed, it was aerospace that pioneered new techniques in HIL (Hardware in the Loop) for testing control strategies. Understandably aerospace engineers from the commercial aircraft industry, national space agencies, and defence-oriented companies continually innovate their design strategies.

This webinar focuses on new modeling techniques and tools for rapidly creating high-fidelity plant models for advanced applications in areas such as space robotics, UA, flight control, and simulators. The techniques are founded on the use of symbolic computation techniques as a framework for efficient model equation formulation and model optimization.

In this webinar you will see how you can very quickly develop complex multibody and multi-domain plant models and produce real-time code and s-functions. The symbolic computation system Maple and the related modeling system MapleSim will be used to illustrate examples. The result is a dramatic decrease in the time to develop the model, without sacrificing fidelity or real-time performance. This webinar will consist of two parts:

1. Introduction to fundamental symbolic techniques to model formulation. How to create efficient multibody plant models, generate real-time code, and perform complex analysis such as inverse kinematic equation derivation.
   
2. Case studies including a gimbal model, a model of a quadrotor, and a planetary rover will be presented.