Standard Dual Quaternion Optimization and Its Applications in Hand-Eye Calibration and SLAM

Abstract: Several common dual quaternion functions, such as the power function, the magnitude function, the $2$-norm function and the $k$th largest eigenvalue of a dual quaternion Hermitian matrix, are standard dual quaternion functions, i.e., the standard parts of their function values depend upon only the standard parts of their dual quaternion variables. Furthermore, the sum, product, minimum, maximum and composite functions of two standard dual functions, the logarithm and the exponential of standard unit dual quaternion functions, are still standard dual quaternion functions. On the other hand, the dual quaternion optimization problem, where objective and constraint function values are dual numbers but variables are dual quaternions, naturally arises from applications. We show that to solve an equality constrained dual quaternion optimization problem, we only need to solve two quaternion optimization problems. If the involved dual quaternion functions are all standard, the optimization problem is called a standard dual quaternion optimization problem, and some better results hold. Then, we show that the dual quaternion optimization problems arising from the hand-eye calibration problem and the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem are equality constrained standard dual quaternion optimization problems.