Screw theory is the algebraic calculation of pairs of vectors, also known as dual vectors – such as angular and linear velocity, or forces and moments – that arise in the kinematics and dynamics of rigid bodies.

Screw theory provides a mathematical formulation for the geometry of lines which is central to rigid body dynamics, where lines form the screw axes of spatial movement and the lines of action of forces. The pair of vectors that form the Plücker coordinates of a line define a unit screw, and general screws are obtained by multiplication by a pair of real numbers and addition of vectors.

Important theorems of screw theory include: the transfer principle proves that geometric calculations for points using vectors have parallel geometric calculations for lines obtained by replacing vectors with screws; Chasles' theorem proves that any change between two rigid object poses can be performed by a single screw; Poinsot's theorem proves that rotations about a rigid object's major and minor – but not intermediate – axes are stable.

Screw theory is an important tool in robot mechanics, mechanical design, computational geometry and multibody dynamics. This is in part because of the relationship between screws and dual quaternions which have been used to interpolate rigid-body motions. Based on screw theory, an efficient approach has also been developed for the type synthesis of parallel mechanisms (parallel manipulators or parallel robots).

A spatial displacement of a rigid body can be defined by a rotation about a line and a translation along the same line, called a screw motion. This is known as Chasles' theorem. The six parameters that define a screw motion are the four independent components of the Plücker vector that defines the screw axis, together with the rotation angle about and linear slide along this line, and form a pair of vectors called a screw. For comparison, the six parameters that define a spatial displacement can also be given by three Euler angles that define the rotation and the three components of the translation vector.

A screw is a six-dimensional vector constructed from a pair of three-dimensional vectors, such as forces and torques and linear and angular velocity, that arise in the study of spatial rigid body movement. The components of the screw define the Plücker coordinates of a line in space and the magnitudes of the vector along the line and moment about this line.

A twist is a screw used to represent the velocity of a rigid body as an angular velocity around an axis and a linear velocity along this axis. All points in the body have the same component of the velocity along the axis, however the greater the distance from the axis the greater the velocity in the plane perpendicular to this axis. Thus, the helicoidal field formed by the velocity vectors in a moving rigid body flattens out the further the points are radially from the twist axis.

The points in a body undergoing a constant twist motion trace helices in the fixed frame. If this screw motion has zero pitch then the trajectories trace circles, and the movement is a pure rotation. If the screw motion has infinite pitch then the trajectories are all straight lines in the same direction.