Rotate vector(s) about axis

Rotate three-dimensional vector(s) about a specified axis by a specified angle.

Description

This is a very simple program that implements Rodrigues's rotation formula. Inputs are arrays of three-dimensional column or row vectors that are to be rotated about a specified axis by a specified angle. Output is array of rotated vectors with same dimension as input array.

• Required Products: MATLAB
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.12 (2011a)

[Jan Simon]

This function has a H1 line and a compact and sufficient documentation of input, outputs, required subfunctions, date and contact address. The size of the input is checked.
Instead of "crosskv = v;" you can start with "crosskv(3) = ..." for the pre-allocation.
It would be nice, if the function accepts [N x 3] arrays also.
The function is small, but useful and usable.

[Ismail Hameduddin]

Jan: Thanks for the comments. I used crosskv = v to handle both column as well as row vectors.

I updated the function to handle [N x 3] or [3 x N] arrays. I didn't originally want to do this because I wanted to avoid too many conditional statements but I think it comes in handy.

[Mukhtar Ullah]

Very compact function that uses built-in functions. My quick and dirty solution to this was

M = makehgtform('axisrotate',k,theta);
v_rot = M(1:3,1:3)*v;

which looks cool but makehgtform is not a built-in function.