3: Time & Motion

The previous chapter discussed how to describe the pose of objects in 2- or 3-dimensional space. This chapter extends those concepts to objects whose pose is varying as a function of time. This chapter covers:

• creating smooth functions of time
• creating smooth multi-axis functions of time
• creating smooth multi-axis multi-segment functions of time, motion through way points
• creating a time varying pose that the robot can follow
• rate of change of pose, its temporal derivative, and how that relates to concepts from mechanics such as velocity and angular velocity.
• accelerometers and gyroscopes
• the principle of inertial navigation, given measurements from velocity and angular velocity sensors how do we update the estimate of pose for a moving object.