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Simo Srkk
1 Basic Properties
Definition 1.1 (Quaternion). Quaternion is a R4 vector of the form
q1
q2
q= q3 .
(1)
q4
what makes quaternions different from ordinary 4-dimensional vectors are the al-
gebraic properties to be defined in this section. In order to write the definitions of
the basic algebraic operations of quaternions in compact form the components are
often divided to scalar part s and vector part v R3 as follows:
s
q= . (2)
v
i i = 1 i j = k j i = k etc. (4)
1
Definition 1.3 (Quaternion sum). The sum of quaternions is the same as the vec-
tor sum:
q1 + p 1
q2 + p 2
q+p= q3 + p 3
(6)
q4 + p 4 .
Definition 1.4 (Quaternion product). The product of two quaternions
q1 p1
q2 p2
q= q3
p=
p3 (7)
q4 p4
is defined as
q 1 p1 q 2 p2 q 3 p3 q 4 p4
q 2 p1 + q 1 p2 q 4 p3 + q 3 p4
q 3 p1 + q 4 p2 + q 1 p3 q 2 p4 .
qp= (8)
q 4 p1 q 3 p2 + q 2 p3 + q 1 p4
This can be derived by writing the quaternions in extended complex form and ex-
panding the product. The quaternion product is not commutative q p 6= p q.
where < vq , vp > denotes the dot product and vq vp denotes the cross product
of vectors vq and vp .
2
or equivalently as
p1 p2 p3 p4 q1
p2 p1 p p 3 q2
4
(13)
q p = P(p) q =
p3 p4 p1 .
p2 q3
p4 p3 p2 p1 q4
Definition 1.5 (Quaternion length). The length of a quaternion is the same as the
norm of the corresponding vector:
q
(14)
p
|q| = q q = q12 + q22 + q32 + q42 .
q
q1 = . (15)
|q|2
is given as
cos(|v|)
exp(q) = exp(s) (17)
|v| sin(|v|)
v
is given as !
ln(|q|)
ln(q) =
s (19)
v
|v| arccos |q| .
3
2 Quaternion Representations of Rotations
Definition 2.1 (Unit quaternion). If quaternion is of the form
cos(/2)
q= , (22)
u sin(/2)
where
is a rotation angle,
then q is a unit quaternion. Unit quaternions can be used for representing a rota-
tion of angle around the axis u. The unit quaternion also has unit length |q| = 1.
Remark 2.1 (Inverse rotation). The inverse rotation can be obtained by conju-
gating the rotation quaternion, that is:
r = q r0 q, (25)
r0 = C r. (26)
A unit quaternion can be converted into equivalent direction cosine matrix as fol-
lows:
2
(q1 + q22 q32 q42 )
2(q2 q3 q1 q4 ) 2(q2 q4 + q1 q3 )
C = 2(q2 q3 + q1 q4 ) (q12 q22 + q32 q42 ) 2(q3 q4 q1 q2 ) .
2(q2 q4 q1 q3 ) 2(q3 q4 + q1 q2 ) (q1 q22 q32 + q42 )
2
(27)
4
3 Quaternion differential equations
Theorem 3.1 (Time behavior of unit quaternion). The time evolution of time
varying quaternion with angular velocity (t) = 1 (t) 2 (t) 3 (t) is given
T
Remark 3.1 (Matrix representations of time behavior). The equation (28) can
be also written in form
dq
= Fq () q, (29)
dt
where
0 1 2 3
1 1 0 3 2
Fq () = . (30)
2 2 3
0 1
3 2 1 0
Theorem 3.2 (Solution with constant angular velocity). If the angular velocity
is time independent constant, then the solution to the equation (28) with given
initial conditions q(t0 ) can be written as
where t = t t0 .
Theorem 3.3 (Solution in quaternion form). The solution (31) can be expressed
as the quaternion product
where
q (t0 , t; ) = exp( t/2)
(34)
cos (|| t/2)
=
|| sin (|| t/2)
and t = t t0 .
5
4 Quaternion interpolation
Definition 4.1 (SLERP).
p(t) = (q1 q1 t
0 ) q0 . (35)
References
[Titterton and Weston, 1997] Titterton, D. H. and Weston, J. L. (1997). Strapdown
Inertial Navigation Technology. Peter Pregrinus Ltd.