A discretization of the nonholonomic Chaplygin sphere problem.
Some simple examples from quantum physics and control theory are used to illustrate the application of the theory of Lie systems. We will show, in particular, that for certain physical models both of the corresponding classical and quantum problems can be treated in a similar way, may be up to the replacement of the Lie group involved by a central extension of it. The geometric techniques developed for dealing with Lie systems are also used in problems of control theory. Specifically, we will study...
We characterize the geometry of a path in a sub-riemannian manifold using two metric invariants, the entropy and the complexity. The entropy of a subset of a metric space is the minimum number of balls of a given radius needed to cover . It allows one to compute the Hausdorff dimension in some cases and to bound it from above in general. We define the complexity of a path in a sub-riemannian manifold as the infimum of the lengths of all trajectories contained in an -neighborhood of the path,...
We characterize the geometry of a path in a sub-Riemannian manifold using two metric invariants, the entropy and the complexity. The entropy of a subset A of a metric space is the minimum number of balls of a given radius ε needed to cover A. It allows one to compute the Hausdorff dimension in some cases and to bound it from above in general. We define the complexity of a path in a sub-Riemannian manifold as the infimum of the lengths of all trajectories contained in an ε-neighborhood of the path,...
In this survey article, nonholonomic mechanics is presented as a part of geometric mechanics. We follow a geometric setting where the constraint manifold is a submanifold in a jet bundle, and a nonholonomic system is modelled as an exterior differential system on the constraint manifold. The approach admits to apply coordinate independent methods, and is not limited to Lagrangian systems under linear constraints. The new methods apply to general (possibly nonconservative) mechanical systems subject...
We study stochastically perturbed non-holonomic systems from a geometric point of view. In this setting, it turns out that the probabilistic properties of the perturbed system are intimately linked to the geometry of the constraint distribution. For -Chaplygin systems, this yields a stochastic criterion for the existence of a smooth preserved measure. As an application of our results we consider the motion planning problem for the noisy two-wheeled robot and the noisy snakeboard.
In this paper we present a geometrical formulation for Lagrangian systems subjected to non-holonomic constraints in terms of jet bundles. Cosymplectic geometry and almost product structures are used to obtained the constrained dynamics without using Lagrange multipliers method.
A formulation of the D’Alembert principle as the orthogonal projection of the acceleration onto an affine plane determined by nonlinear nonholonomic constraints is given. Consequences of this formulation for the equations of motion are discussed in the context of several examples, together with the attendant singular reduction theory.
A unified geometric approach to nonholonomic constrained mechanical systems is applied to several concrete problems from the classical mechanics of particles and rigid bodies. In every of these examples the given constraint conditions are analysed, a corresponding constraint submanifold in the phase space is considered, the corresponding constrained mechanical system is modelled on the constraint submanifold, the reduced equations of motion of this system (i.e. equations of motion defined on the...