In the present paper nonholonomic systems with drift terms are studied. The discussion is focused on a class of Lagrangian systems with a cyclic coordinate. We present an approach to open-loop path planning in which the system evolution is studied on manifolds of dimension equal to the number of control inputs. A control procedure is derived and it is applied to the planar diver. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
J.-M. Godhavn, A. Balluchi, L. S. Crawford, S. S.