In this paper, a research and development project on a generic animated simulator for robot manipulators is reported. The simulator animates the dynamic motion of a robotic system based on a set of position, velocity, acceleration, and force data generated from certain control algorithms, given through a data file, or imported from external programs. The data specifying the animated motion of the robotic system can be given in either the robot joint space or the task Cartesian space. The simulator is capable of constructing arbitrarily shaped robotic system structures and environment objects if they can be modeled as rigid combination of convex polyhedra. Dynamic properties of the system have been taken into considerations so that they can be specified by a user to reflect different dynamic objects and environment. The simulator is controlled through a graphic interface. The simulator is implemented on a NeXT TurboStation using Objective-C programming environment and the NeXT Interface Builder.
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