Sguaba: Hard-to-misuse rigid body transforms for engineers

Sguaba: hard-to-misuse rigid body transforms for engineers with other things to worry about than linear algebra Helsing Follow 4 min read · May 23, 2025 -- Listen Share There are a wide variety of ways to describe the locations of objects in space. To name a few, there is: WGS84, the well-known Earth-bound system of latitude and longitude; ECEF (“Earth-centered, Earth-fixed”), a Cartesian coordinate system fixed to Earth’s axes; NED (“North, East, Down”), a coordinate system that describes where in compass directions a given object is relative to an observer; or FRD (“Front, Right, Down”), which describes where a given object is relative to the facing direction of an observer. And to make matters worse, points in all of these systems except WGS84 can be expressed in Cartesian coordinates (ie, X, Y, and Z), spherical coordinates (ie, angle to pole, angle on XY plane, and radius), or horizontal coordinates (ie, azimuth, elevation, and distance). Manannán mac Lir. Photo by Kenneth Allen ... Read full article.