A new approach to investigation of Carnot-Carathéodory geometry (Q5894165)

Mainly, the paper studies a local geometry of Carnot-Carathéodory spaces without \textit{M. Gromov}'s result [Prog. Math. 144, 79--323 (1996; Zbl 0864.53025)] on convergence of ``rescaled'' basis vector fields to vector fields constituting a nilpotent graded Lie algebra and Campbell-Hausdorff formula. This new approach enables us to discover essentially new and fine properties of Carnot-Carathéodory spaces under minimal assumptions on the smoothness of the basis vector fields. Moreover, many classical results that are well-known for the smooth case, are obtained under these assumptions.