#### 3D angular velocity

Now consider the rotation of a 3D rigid body. Recall from Section 3.3 that Euler's rotation theorem implies that every 3D rotation can be described as a rotation about an axis though the origin. As the orientation of the body changes over a short period of time , imagine the axis that corresponds to the change in rotation. In the case of the merry-go-round, the axis would be . More generally, could be any unit vector.

The 3D angular velocity is therefore expressed as a 3D vector:

 (8.15)

which can be imagined as taking the original from the 2D case and multiplying it by the vector . This weights the components according to the coordinate axes. Thus, the components could be considered as , , and . The , , and components also correspond to the rotation rate in terms of pitch, roll, and yaw, respectively. We avoided these representations in Section 3.3 due to noncommutativity and kinematic singularities; however, it turns out that for velocities these problems do not exist [308]. Thus, we can avoid quaternions at this stage.

Steven M LaValle 2019-03-14