(2.58)
Now consider three coordinate frames o0x0y0z0, o1x1y1z1, and o2x2y2z2. Let d1 be the vector from the origin of o0x0y0z0 to the origin of o1x1y1z1 and d2 be the vector from the origin of o1x1y1z1 to the origin of o2x2y2z2. If the point p is attached to frame o2x2y2z2 with local coordinates
(2.59)
and
(2.60)
The composition of these two equations defines a third rigid motion, which we can describe by substituting the expression for
(2.61)
Since the relationship between
(2.62)
Comparing Equations (2.61) and (2.62) we have the relationships
(2.63)
(2.64)
Equation (2.63) shows that the orientation transformations can simply be multiplied together and Equation (2.64) shows that the vector from the origin o0 to the origin o2 has coordinates given by the sum of
2.6.1 Homogeneous Transformations
One can easily see that the calculation leading to Equation (2.61) would quickly become intractable if a long sequence of rigid motions were considered. In this section we show how rigid motions can be represented in matrix form so that composition of rigid motions can be reduced to matrix multiplication as was the case for composition of rotations.
In fact, a comparison of Equations (2.63) and (2.64) with the matrix identity
(2.65)
where 0 denotes the row vector (0, 0, 0), shows that the rigid motions can be represented by the set of matrices of the form
(2.66)
Transformation matrices of the form given in Equation (2.66) are called homogeneous transformations. A homogeneous transformation is therefore nothing more than a matrix representation of a rigid motion and we will use SE(3) interchangeably to represent both the set of rigid motions and the set of all 4 × 4 matrices
Using the fact that
(2.67)
In order to represent the transformation given in Equation (2.58) by a matrix multiplication, we must augment the vectors
(2.68)
(2.69)
The vectors