Publication

On Cayley's factorization of 4D rotations and applications

Journal Article (2017)

Journal

Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras

Pages

523-538

Volume

27

Number

1

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00006-016-0683-9

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

A 4D rotation can be decomposed into a left- and a right-isoclinic rotation. This decomposition, known as Cayley’s factorization of 4D rotations, can be performed using the Elfrinkhof–Rosen method. In this paper, we present a more straightforward alternative approach using the corresponding orthogonal subspaces, for which orthogonal bases can be defined. This yields easy formulations, both in the space of 4x4 real orthogonal matrices representing 4D rotations and in the Clifford algebra C_{4,0,0}. Cayley’s factorization has many important applications. It can be used to easily transform rotations represented using matrix algebra to different Clifford algebras. As a practical application of the proposed method, it is shown how Cayley’s factorization can be used to efficiently compute the screw parameters of 3D rigid-body transformations.

Categories

automation.

Author keywords

4D Rotations

Scientific reference

A. Perez and F. Thomas. On Cayley's factorization of 4D rotations and applications. Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras, 27(1): 523-538, 2017.