rowan

Welcome to the documentation for rowan, a package for working with quaternions! Quaternions form a number system with various interesting properties, and they have a number of uses. This package provides tools for standard algebraic operations on quaternions as well as a number of additional tools for e.g. measuring distances between quaternions, interpolating between them, and performing basic point-cloud mapping. A particular focus of the rowan package is working with unit quaternions, which are a popular means of representing rotations in 3D. In order to provide a unified framework for working with the various rotation formalisms in 3D, rowan allows easy interconversion between these formalisms.

Core features of rowan include (but are not limited to):

• Algebra (multiplication, exponentiation, etc).
• Derivatives and integrals of quaternions.
• Rotation and reflection operations, with conversions to and from matrices, axis angles, etc.
• Various distance metrics for quaternions.
• Basic point set registration, including solutions of the Procrustes problem and the Iterative Closest Point algorithm.
• Quaternion interpolation (slerp, squad).

To install rowan, you have a few options. The package can either be installed through PyPI:

using conda

or by cloning the repository from source and running setuptools

Note that the conda installation requires that you first add the conda-forge channel.

Contents:

• rowan
• calculus
• geometry
• interpolate
• mapping
• random
• Development Guide
  • Philosophy
  • Source Code Conventions
  • Unit Tests
  • General Notes
  • Release Guide

Reference:

• License
• Changelog
• Credits

Support and Contribution

This package is hosted on Bitbucket. Please report any bugs or problems that you find on the issue tracker.

All contributions to rowan are welcomed via pull requests! Please see the development guide for more information on requirements for new code.

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page