Why Robots Need Spatial Math · 1/2
Position and orientation aren't the same thing
Knowing where a robot's hand is isn't enough to fully describe it. A robot arm's gripper at a given point in space could be pointing straight down to pick something up, or sideways to slide it off a shelf, and those are completely different actions even though the gripper occupies the same point. A full description of a rigid body in 3D space needs both its position, a single point, and its orientation, which way it's rotated relative to some reference.
Together, position and orientation are called a pose. Every task a robot does, reaching for an object, planning a path, avoiding a collision, ultimately comes down to reasoning about poses precisely enough that there's no ambiguity about what the robot will actually do when it moves.