Dual Quaternions as a Tool for Rigid Body Motion Analysis: A Tutorial with an Application to Biomechanics

Dual quaternions and dual quaternion interpolation are pow erful mathematical tools for the spatial analysis of rigid body motions. In thispaper, after a review of some basic results and formulas, it will be presented an attempt to use t hese tools for the the kinematic modeling of human joints. In particular, the kinematic para meters extracted from experimen- tally acquired data are compared with those theoretically c from dual quaternions rigid body motion interpolation.