Kinematics - Rigid Body Transformation

Core Math in Robotics Kinematics following course MEAM 620 at Penn

January 29, 2017 - 3 minute read -
robotics notes

Rigid Body Transformations

Notations

  • represents the orientation of frame with respect to frame .
  • represents the translation of frame with respect to frame .
  • represents the homogeneous transformations of frame with respect to frame .

Where, in 3d, is a 3 3 matrix, is a vector.

  • represent rotations about the axis (right-hand rule) by angle

Rotation

Composite Transformations

  • Post-multiply successive transformations about intermediate frames
  • Pre-multiply successive transformations about fixed frames

Composition of homogeneous transformations follows the rules of rotation matrices.

Inverse Transformations

  • Rotations
  • Homogeneous transformations

Skew Symmetric Matrices

is the skew symmetrix matrix.

For any skew symmetrix matrix .

2D Rotation

The rotation in 2d can be viewed as the complex number

Rodrigues’ Formula

Rodrigues’ formula gives us an decomposition of the rotation matrix into axis and angle.

Quaternions

Quatornion is a 4 dimensional representation of the rotation matrix. The basis are . The quatornion is a generalization of complex number.

  • Unit Quatornion Properties
    • Relation to angle-axis

    • Not unique

    • Commutativity

    • Conjugate

    • Inverse

    • Norm

    • Multiplication

    • Operation on a vector ( is representing rotation matrix )