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Concept
Sub-Riemannian manifold
Summary
In mathematics, a sub-Riemannian manifold is a certain type of generalization of a Riemannian manifold. Roughly speaking, to measure distances in a sub-Riemannian manifold, you are allowed to go only along curves tangent to so-called horizontal subspaces.
Sub-Riemannian manifolds (and so, a fortiori, Riemannian manifolds) carry a natural intrinsic metric called the metric of Carnot–Carathéodory. The Hausdorff dimension of such metric spaces is always an integer and larger than its topological dimension (unless it is actually a Riemannian manifold).
Sub-Riemannian manifolds often occur in the study of constrained systems in classical mechanics, such as the motion of vehicles on a surface, the motion of robot arms, and the orbital dynamics of satellites. Geometric quantities such as the Berry phase may be understood in the language of sub-Riemannian geometry. The Heisenberg group, important to quantum mechanics, carries a natural sub-Riemannian structure.
By a distribution on we mean a subbundle of the tangent bundle of .
Given a distribution a vector field in is called horizontal. A curve on is called horizontal if for any
A distribution on is called completely non-integrable if for any we have that any tangent vector can be presented as a linear combination of vectors of the following types where all vector fields are horizontal.
A sub-Riemannian manifold is a triple , where is a differentiable manifold, is a completely non-integrable "horizontal" distribution and is a smooth section of positive-definite quadratic forms on .
Any sub-Riemannian manifold carries the natural intrinsic metric, called the metric of Carnot–Carathéodory, defined as
where infimum is taken along all horizontal curves such that , .
A position of a car on the plane is determined by three parameters: two coordinates and for the location and an angle which describes the orientation of the car.
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