A browser-based 2D kinematics simulator for building and testing arbitrary robot arms. Users assemble a custom chain of prismatic and revolute joints, set per-joint rotation and travel limits, then drag the end effector to any point in the plane and watch the arm solve for it in real time.

Inverse kinematics runs on the damped least-squares pseudoinverse of the Jacobian, which keeps the solver stable near singularities where a naive pseudoinverse blows up. Joint values stream to a live plot alongside the workspace view, so the relationship between a smooth Cartesian path and the messy joint trajectories underneath it is visible at a glance. Built in React and TypeScript with an HTML5 canvas renderer, no physics engine, all kinematics written from scratch.

The simulator exists because Jacobian-based motion is difficult to build intuition for from the matrices alone. Seeing an arm fold through a singularity teaches the concept faster than deriving it.

View published site: https://2droboticsim.netlify.app/