Radial kinetic nonholonomic trajectories are Riemannian geodesics! (Q2240798)

In this paper, an interesting result that characterize radial nonholonomic geodesics is presented. It is proved that for kinetic nonholonomic systems, the solutions starting from a fixed point \(q\) are true geodesics for a family of Riemannian metrics on the image submanifold \(\mathcal{M}_q^{nh}\) of the nonholonomic exponential map. This fact shows that the kinetic nonholonomic trajectories with starting point \(q\), for sufficiently small times, minimize length in \(\mathcal{M}_q^{nh}\). This result opens the door to new developments in nonholonomic mechanics using Riemannian geometry techniques: Jacobi fields, global minimizing properties of nonholonomic trajectories, construction of variational integrators for nonholonomic mechanics, Hamiltonization or Lagrangianization of nonholonomic systems.