A Study on the Methods of Rigid-Body Attitude Representations

A detailed survey is presented of the methods of rigid-body attitude representation, including Euler angles, the Euler-axis rotation parameters, the direction cosines and the Euler-Rodrigues quaternion. The emphasis is on the application of quaternion to the aircraft kinematics, which removes the singularity in the Euler angles formulation and the Euler angles formulation and is superior to the other methods based on computation efficiency alone. The methods and errors of numerical integration are discussed in the end.