A case for SysML in robotics

As robotics continues to integrate into society, systems and interactions become increasingly complex. To be able to accurately model such systems, a method is needed that can scale with this complexity, but that can also be standardized. This paper proposes the use of the Systems Modeling Language, or SysML, as such a modeling approach. Based on the popular UML standard, and designed for systems engineering, SysML can scale up for complex systems and is already an industry standard for modeling systems. In this paper we introduce SysML, compare SysML to other formal modeling languages, and discuss its benefits and drawbacks as a modeling language for robotic systems. We also provide an example of how SysML can be used to model robot manipulation tasks.