A new approach to investigation of Carnot-Carathéodory geometry (Q5894480)

A Carnot-Carathéodory space \(M\) is a connected Riemannian manifold with a distinguished horizontal sub-bundle \(HM\) of the tangent bundle \(TM\), which meets some algebraic conditions on the commutators of the vector fields \(\{X_1,X_2,\dots,X_n\}\) constituting a local basis for \(HM\). A piecewise smooth curve \(\gamma\) is called horizontal if \(\overset{\cdot }{\gamma }(t)\in H_{\gamma (t)}M\). The distance (the Carnot-Carathéodory metric) between two points \(x,y\in M\) is defined as the infimum of the lengths of horizontal curves connecting \(x\) and \(y\). In this interesting paper the author develops a new approach in order to study the local geometry of Carnot-Carathéodory spaces under the minimal assumptions on the smoothness of basis vector fields. The quantitative comparison estimates for the local geometries of two different local Carnot groups are obtained. Also, the author proves some results that are well-known in the ''smooth'' case: the generalized triangle inequality for \(d_\infty \), the local aproximation theorem for the quasimetric \(d_\infty \), the Rashevskií-Chow theorem, the ball-box theorem.