Symplectic reduction of holonomic open-chain multi-body systems with constant momentum (Q2255879)

The authors apply symplectic reduction to a physical system relevant to robotics. This system consists of a number of rigid parts, connected by joints that limit their relative movement. Its configuration space is a Cartesian product of Lie groups, each representing the possible positions of one of the joints. One can always reduce the phase space by the action of one of these Lie groups by left multiplication. The first main result in this paper is an explicit description of the reduced phase space, Hamiltonian function and kinetic energy Riemannian metric. Assuming the system to have additional symmetry, one can apply a further reduction. This is described in the second main result (an equivalent description of the reduced phase spaces that appear, in terms of coadjoint orbits, is given in Section 5 of [\textit{J. E. Marsden} and \textit{M. Perlmutter}, C. R. Math. Acad. Sci., Soc. R. Can. 22, No. 2, 33--54 (2000; Zbl 0963.37047)]).