Robot Modeling and Control, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 2RIGID MOTIONS

A large part of robot kinematics is concerned with establishing various coordinate frames to represent the positions and orientations of rigid objects, and with transformations among these coordinate frames. Indeed, the geometry of three-dimensional space and of rigid motions plays a central role in all aspects of robotic manipulation. In this chapter we study the operations of rotation and translation, and introduce the notion of homogeneous transformations.

Homogeneous transformations combine the operations of rotation and translation into a single matrix multiplication, and are used in Chapter 3 to derive the so-called forward kinematic equations of rigid manipulators. Since we make extensive use of elementary matrix theory, the reader may wish to review Appendix B before beginning this chapter.

We begin by examining representations of points and vectors in a Euclidean space equipped with multiple coordinate frames. Following this, we introduce the concept of a rotation matrix to represent relative orientations among coordinate frames. We then combine these two concepts to build homogeneous transformation matrices, which can be used to simultaneously represent the position and orientation of one coordinate frame relative to another. Furthermore, homogeneous transformation matrices can be used to perform coordinate transformations. Such transformations allow us to represent various quantities in different coordinate frames, a facility that we will often ...