Jacob R. Goodman

Margarida Camarinha, Jacob R. Goodman

This paper constructs a connection map on the second-order tangent bundle induced by a linear connection on the base manifold and uses it to define a generalized Sasaki metric. The associated geodesic equations are derived, and jet-constrained variational problems are shown to yield Riemannian quintics in tension. The construction is then specialized to rigid body attitude dynamics with first-order actuator dynamics, producing an intrinsic higher-order trajectory model on the rotation group. Numerical simulations compare quintics in tension with Riemannian cubics as nominal trajectories and show modest reductions in actuator-relevant cost with comparable tracking performance.

Jacob R. Goodman, Hajg Jasa

We introduce a rank-one Riemannian cometric update inducing a modification of the Riemannian metric that makes specific directions of motion cheaper to travel along. We establish basic completeness properties of this reward metric, and give an explicit characterization of its Levi--Civita connection. We propose a preconditioned trajectory-tracking strategy by adding the connection-difference term to a standard intrinsic PD control, and illustrate the construction on a connection control-affine system on the Special Euclidean group with a maze navigation experiment. When the nominal trajectory is an integral curve of the vector field used to define the reward metric, our methodology improves the overall tracking, which is demonstrated through simulation results.