pose

A pose is the complete answer to the question "where is this thing, and which way is it facing?" It bundles two pieces of information together: position, meaning the exact spot in space (how far left, forward, and up), and orientation, meaning which way the object is turned (is it tilted, rotated, pointing north or east?). Knowing only one of these is never enough. A coffee mug on your desk has a location, but it also matters whether the handle points toward you or away; both facts together are its pose.

In full 3D, a free-floating rigid body has six degrees of freedom: three for position (left-right, forward-back, up-down) and three for orientation (the turns often called roll, pitch, and yaw). A pose pins down all six at once. This matters enormously in robotics, because a robot must know not just where its gripper hand is, but how that hand is angled before it can grab a cup without spilling it. A pose is always stated relative to some agreed reference point, called a frame: "the gripper is 30 cm in front of the robot's shoulder, tilted 45 degrees downward." Change the reference frame and the same physical object gets a different set of pose numbers, even though it has not moved at all.

Engineers often pack a pose into a single compact object, such as a homogeneous transformation matrix, so the computer can carry both the position and the orientation around as one tidy unit. That way a single piece of math can answer "where and how is it placed?" in one step, instead of juggling two separate descriptions.