9. 3D rigid body geometry

This chapter introduces rigid body basics such as the notions of points, vectors, and homogeneous transforms, how to navigate between local and global coordinates, and how to extract rotation angles from a series of rigid transforms. Such knowledge will be highly beneficial to fully understand kinematic analyses.

Chapter Contents

• 9.1. Geometry basics: coordinate systems, points, vectors, and transforms
• 9.2. Expressing series of numbers, points, vectors, and transforms in Kinetics Toolkit
• 9.3. Rotating and translating coordinates
• 9.4. The homogeneous transform: mapping coordinates to other coordinate systems
• 9.5. Kinematic chains
• 9.6. Extracting angles
• 9.7. Exercises