Polar Decomposition of Unit Dual Quaternions

Abstract

This paper seeks to extend the notion of polar decomposition (PD) from matrix algebra to dual-quaternion algebra. The goal is to obtain a simple, efficient and explicit method for determining the PD of spatial displacements in Euclidean three-space that belong to a special Euclidean Group known as SE(3). It has been known that such a decomposition is equivalent to the projection of an element of SE(3) onto SO(4) that yields hyper spherical displacements that best approximate rigid-body displacements. It is shown in this paper that a dual quaternion representing an element of SE(3) can be decomposed into a pair of unit quaternions, called double quaternion, that represents an element of SO(4). Furthermore, this decomposition process may be interpreted as the projection of a point in four-dimensional space onto a unit hypersphere. An example is provided to illustrate that the results obtained from this dual-quaternion based polar decomposition are same as those obtained from the matrix based polar decomposition.