Graphical Simulation of a Mobile Robot.

Some facets of our robotics research require the simulation of a mobile vehicle to study navigation and control problems. We have developed a 3-D animated graphical simulation of the movement of a wheeled vehicle under interactive control of the computer user. The article describes the mathematical formulation of the dynamics and the programming procedure to display the vehicle movement. Besides the possible use of our program for robotics education, the aspects covered by this article could be useful for motivating mechanics and graphics programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]