Orientation Modeling Using Quaternions and Rational Trigonometry

Abstract

In recent years, the recreational and commercial use of flight and driving simulators has become more popular. All these applications require the calculation of orientation in either two or three dimensions. Besides the Euler angles notation, other alternatives to represent rigid body rotations include axis-angle notation, homogeneous transformation matrices, and quaternions. All these methods involve transcendental functions in their calculations, which represents a disadvantage when these algorithms are implemented in hardware. The use of transcendental functions in software-based algorithms may not represent a significant disadvantage, but in hardware-based algorithms, the potential of rational models stands out. Generally, to calculate transcendental functions in hardware, it is necessary to utilize algorithms based on the CORDIC algorithm, which requires a significant amount of hardware resources (parallel) or the design of a more complex control unit (pipelined). This research presents a new procedure for model orientation using rational trigonometry and quaternion notation, avoiding trigonometric functions for calculations. We describe the orientation of a gimbal mechanism presented in many applications, from autonomous vehicles such as cars or drones to industrial manipulators. This research aims to compare the efficiency of a rational implementation to classical modeling using the techniques mentioned above. Furthermore, we simulate the models with software tools and propose a hardware architecture to implement our algorithms.