Greetings all!
I recently completed a demo of the physics of a simple robot arm operated under PID control. I wrote it primarily as a teaching aid for the basics of PID control theory, but it might also be useful as a springboard for writing your own more accurate simulator. The demo is written in the Python programming language and uses Panda3D (freely available at
http://www.panda3d.org) for graphics and simulation.
You can retrieve the demo here:
http://fixermark.googlepages.com/ArmSimulator.zip
Feel free to play around with it and let me know what you think. Best of luck to everyone in this year's competition!
Take care,
Mark