Control of mechanical systems on Lie groups and ideal hydrodynamics (Q844432)

In the paper under review a mechanical system is considered, whose configuration space is a Lie group and whose Lagrangian is invariant with respect to left translations on this group. It is assumed that the mass geometry of the system may change under the action of internal control forces. Such a system can also be reduced to a Lie group. Without controls, this mechanical system describes a geodesic flow of the left-invariant metric, given by the Lagrangian, and therefore its reduced flow is a stationary ideal fluid flow on the Lie group. The standard control problem for such a system is to find the conditions under which the system can be brought from any initial position in the configuration space to another preassigned position by changing its mass geometry. It is shown that under these conditions, by changing the mass geometry, one can also bring one vortex manifold to any other preassigned vortex manifold.