New developments on the Geometric Nonholonomic Integrator

Sebastián Ferraro, Fernando Jiménez, David Martín de Diego

Published 2013-12-05, updated 2014-10-01Version 2

In this paper, we will discuss new developments regarding the Geometric Nonholonomic Integrator (GNI) [23, 24]. GNI is a discretization scheme adapted to nonholonomic mechanical systems through a discrete geometric approach. This method was designed to account for some of the special geometric structures associated to a nonholonomic motion, like preservation of energy, preservation of constraints or the nonholonomic momentum equation. First, we study the GNI versions of the symplectic-Euler methods, paying special attention to their convergence behavior. Then, we construct an extension of the GNI in the case of affine constraints. Finally, we generalize the proposed method to nonholonomic reduced systems, an important subclass of examples in nonholonomic dynamics. We illustrate the behavior of the proposed method with the example of the Chaplygin sphere, which accounts for the last two features, namely it is both a reduced and an affine system.