The design and simulation of RIPS, a robotic instruction processing system, are discussed. The authors are building a prototype version of RIPS which will be used as a general research tool to study problems of robot control. The architecture of RIPS is geared for robot control, yet the system is general and fully programmable and does not assume any manipulator characteristics. There is sufficient computing capacity to address any of several important automation problems such as force control, multiple manipulator coordination, or manufacturing cell-level control. Simulations show that using RIPS to control a Stanford manipulator with the computed torque method gives an update rate of 255 mu s. This simulation includes all interprocessor communication as well as the computing time necessary for equation evaluation.>