The rolling ball problem on the plane revisited (Q2393643)

In this article the following problem is considered. By a sequence of rollings without slipping or twisting along segments of a straight line of the plane, a spherical ball of unit radius has to be transferred from an initial state to an arbitrary final state taking into account the orientation of the ball. The authors prove that the distance from a given initial state to an arbitrary final state can be covered with at most 3 moves. Furthermore the authors prove that ``generically'' no one of the three moves, in any elimination of the spin discrepancy, may have length equal to an integral multiple of \(2\pi\).