um.</p>

    <p>Why a pendulum?  In part, because the dynamics of a majority of our
    multi-link robotics manipulators are simply the dynamics of a large number
    of coupled pendula.  Also, the dynamics of a single pendulum are rich enough
    to introduce most of the concepts from nonlinear dynamics that we will use
    in this text, but tractable enough for us to (mostly) understand in the next
    few pages. </p>

    <figure> <img width="30%" src="figures/simple_pend.svg"/>
    <figcaption>The simpl