In Russia.
As we have seen using the TF2 library, there are two different ways to express the orientation of our
reference frames in space.
Initially when we approached the study of the kinematics, we used rotation matrices and so it was possible
to decompose the orientation of a reference frame with respect to another into three fundamental components,
three elemental rotations around the Z, Y and X axis.
These three angles.
These three elemental rotations are commonly referred to as Euler angles, and they allow us to represent
the orientation of a body in the three dimensional space in a simple and intuitive way.
However, in the laboratory lessons we also saw that rose to use another convention for the orientation
representations, namely the Quaternions.
We also saw that this tool is composed of four variables, which are the four variables that we had
to assign to the orientation of the reference frames.
These two tools serve the same purpose, representing the orientation of our reference frame with respect
to another.
However, in computer science, whenever it is needed to express the orientation of a body, quaternions
are preferred.
This is not only the case in robotics, but also in video games development, for example, in computer
vision, animation and also special effects.
In the upcoming lessons, we will analyze these two equivalent tools and see the reason why Quaternions
prevail over rotation matrices in computer science.