Euler-Rodrigues Parameters: A Quantum Circuit to Calculate Rigid-Body Rotations

Abstract: The use of vectorial parameterization to create geometrical representations in computational models has a large number of applications. One particular application is the calculation of the 3D rotational motion of rigid bodies, that could be used for the spatial location estimation from objects. Provided the algebraic nature of this problem, it could benefit from Quantum Computing, in particular several vectors could be superposed to be transformed with a single operation, providing a quantum processing advantage. In this article, we propose an implementation of a Quantum Computing algorithm to compute Euler-Rodrigues Parameters to model rigid body rotations to transform arbitrary functions, rotating multiple vectors in superposition. We developed this algorithm using Qiskit, taking into account the limitations imposed by the current Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, such as the reduced number of qubits available and the limited coherence time.