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Industrial demand for high precision manipulators has lead to heavy, stiff, and therefore, expensive, inefficient, and potentially dangerous serial arm manipulators. The move towards lighter, and therefore, flexible manipulators has not matured, although there have been advancements in data processing capabilities, sensor technology, and control theory in the past couple of decades that could potentially reduce the problems with flexible serial manipulators. Most research in the past has focused on single link manipulators and planar robot arms and less research has been done on spatial multi-link robots. This work presents the derivation for a low-order model for spatial multi-link serial arms. Due to its low number of degrees of freedom this model can be used in real-time systems for control and estimation. The model is then verified by comparing its performance to results from commercial finite element software. Additional tests are performed against a flexible robot arm testbed.

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Touchscreen computers hold great promise as educational tools. Many universities, high schools and elementary schools are working to create curricula that exploit these devices. An important part of this work is the development of textbooks that move away from the static display of words and figures to include interactive components such as videos and interactive simulations. We present such an interactive textbook, developed for an undergraduate course in mechanical engineering. We describe the course for which it was developed and the interactive components of the book. Student evaluations of the textbook are presented and discussed. Finally, we offer suggestions for additional steps that can improve interactive textbooks for use on tablet computers.