A Primer on the Differential Calculus of 3D Orientations

Understand

The proper handling of 3D orientations is a central element in many optimization problems in engineering.

• Unfortunately many researchers and engineers struggle with the formulation of such problems and often fall back to suboptimal solutions.
• The existence of many different conventions further complicates this issue, especially when interfacing multiple differing implementations.
• This document discusses an alternative approach which makes use of a more abstract notion of 3D orientations.