We describe an approach which facilitates and makes explicit the organization of the knowledge necessary to map robotic system requirements onto an appropriate assembly of algorlthms, processors, sensors, and actuators. In order to achieve this mapping several kinds of knowledge are needed. In this paper, we describe a system under development which exploits the Computer Aided Design (CAD) database in order to synthesize. *recognition Code for vision systems (both 2-D and 3-D), *grasping sites for simple parallel grippers, and *manipulation strategies for dextrous manipulation. We use an object-based approach and give an example application of the system to CAD-based 2-D vision.