This work explores dual quaternions and their applications. First, a theoretical construction begins at dual numbers, extends to dual vectors, and culminates in dual quaternions. The physical foundations behind the developed theory lie in two important fundamentals: Chasles’ Theorem and the Transference Principle. The former addresses how to represent rigid-body motion whereas the latter provides a method for operating on it. This combination presents dual quaternions as a framework for modeling rigid mechanical systems, both kinematically and kinetically, in a compact, elegant and performant way. Next, a review on the applications of dual quaternions is carried out, providing a general overview of all applications. Important subjects are further detailed, these being the kinematics and dynamics of rigid bodies and mechanisms (both serial and parallel), control and motion interpolation. Discussions regarding dual quaternions and their applications are undertaken, highlighting open questions and research gaps. The advantages and disadvantages of using dual quaternions are summarized. Lastly, conclusions and future directions of research are presented.

The traditional aviary decontamination process involves farmers applying pesticides to the aviary’s ground. These agricultural defenses are easily dispersed in the air, making the farmers susceptible to chronic diseases related to recurrent exposure. Industry 5.0 raises new pillars of research and innovation in transitioning to more sustainable, human-centric, and resilient companies. Based on these concepts, this paper presents a new aviary decontamination process that uses IoT and a robotic platform coupled with ozonizer (O₃) and ultraviolet light (UVL). These clean technologies can successfully decontaminate poultry farms against pathogenic microorganisms, insects, and mites. Also, they can degrade toxic compounds used to control living organisms. This new decontamination process uses physicochemical information from the poultry litter through sensors installed in the environment, which allows accurate and safe disinfection. Different experimental tests were conducted to construct the system. First, tests related to measuring soil moisture, temperature, and pH were carried out, establishing the range of use and the confidence interval of the measurements. The robot’s navigation uses a back-and-forth motion that parallels the aviary’s longest side because it reduces the number of turns, reducing energy consumption. This task becomes more accessible because of the aviaries’ standardized geometry. Furthermore, the prototype was tested in a real aviary to confirm the innovation, safety, and effectiveness of the proposal. Tests have shown that the UV + ozone combination is sufficient to disinfect this environment.

This paper investigates the viability of applying a functional machine with a fuzzy approach for redundancy resolution to an autonomous underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS). The functional machine is constructed by a linear combination of sigmoidal functions, with a topology similar to the perceptron, and its inference is developed by fuzzy logic. The proposed algorithm generates a desired trajectory for the vehicle that takes into account two control objectives: the energy savings and the increase of system manipulability by a smooth actuation. The computer simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of this approach.

SUMMARY Differential kinematics is a traditional approach to linearize the mapping between the workspace and joint space. However, a Jacobian matrix cannot be inverted directly in redundant systems or in configurations where kinematic singularities occur. This work presents a novel approach to the solution of differential kinematics through the use of dual quaternions. The main advantage of this approach is to reduce “drift” error in differential kinematics and to ignore the kinematic singularities. An analytical dual-quaternionic Jacobian is defined, which allows for the application of this approach in any robotic system.