On Higher Order Point-Line and the Associated Rigid Body Motions

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the higher-order motion of point-lines embedded on rigid bodies. The mathematic treatment of the paper is based on dual quaternion algebra and differential geometry of line trajectories, which facilitate a concise and unified description of the material in this paper. Due to the unified treatment, the results are directly applicable to line motion as well. The transformation of a point-line between positions is expressed as a unit dual quaternion referred to as the point-line displacement operator depicting a pure translation along the point-line followed by a screw displacement about their common normal. The derivatives of the point-line displacement operator characterize the point-line motion to various orders with a set of characteristic numbers. A set of associated rigid body motions is obtained by applying an instantaneous rotation about the point-line. It shows that the ISA trihedrons of the associated rigid motions can be simply depicted with a set of ∞2 cylindroids. It also presents for a rigid body motion, the locus of lines and point-lines with common rotation or translation characteristics about the line axes. Lines embedded in a rigid body with uniform screw motion are presented. For a general rigid body motion, one may find lines generating up to the third order uniform screw motion about these lines.