Optimal Control of a Rigid Body with Two Oscillators

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the exploration of reduction and explicit solvability of optimal control problems on principal bundles with connections from a Hamiltonian point of view. The particular mechanical system we consider is a rigid body with two driven oscillators, for which the bundle structure is (SO (3) x 者, 者, SO (3)). The optimal control problem is posed by considering a special nonholonomic variational problem, in which the nonholonomic distribution is defined via a connection. The necessary conditions for the optimal control problem are determined intrinsically by a Hamiltonian formulation. The necessary conditions admit the structure group of the principal bundle as a symmetry group of the system. Thus the problem is amendable to Poisson reduction. Under suitable hypotheses and approximations, we find that the reduced system possesses additional symmetry which is isomorphic to S1. Applying Poisson reduction again, we obtain a further reduced system and corresponding first integral. These reductions imply explicit solvability for suitable values of parameters.