I don't quite understand about some parameters of flexible beam. Please introduce  briefly.
 
1. Truncation order of inertial terms
2. Truncation order of elastic coordinates
3. Number of elastic coordinates

There is a example "3D rigid slider crank" in the MapleSim examples. Replace the "crank" and the "rod" with flexible beam, turn it into a flexible system, how to do that?

Thank you very much!

Thank you very much.
 
As you say, the rigid body frame components, can define the end points of the link. But what about "the flexible beam", how to define its endpoint? The "maplesim help"  say "the beam is straight and its neutral axis is aligned with the x axis of the primary frame", then its deformation is measured.  I think in a system, the flexible beam is used together with the rigid body frames, but it always point to the direction of the x axis,...

I am building a robot arm,now I want to replace the rigid arm with the flexible arm. How can I control the arm's form?

I need to use the flexible beam in my model. I want to know if the component's correctness can be guaranteed, but I can't find any correlative documents or thesis, only find an article titled "Dymola – Flexible Bodies library". Is the flexible beam in maplesim similar to this? based on the modelica library? applied the finite element method? Some detailed information is very helpful.