Projective Reeds-Shepp car on $S^2$ with quadratic cost

Abstract

Fix two points $x,\bar{x}\in S^2$ and two directions (without orientation) $\eta,\bar\eta$ of the velocities in these points. In this paper we are interested to the problem of minimizing the cost $$ J[\gamma]=\int_0^T g_{\gamma(t)}(\dot\gamma(t),\dot\gamma(t))+ K^2_{\gamma(t)}g_{\gamma(t)}(\dot\gamma(t),\dot\gamma(t)) ~dt$$ along all smooth curves starting from $x$ with direction $\eta$ and ending in $\bar{x}$ with direction $\bar\eta$. Here $g$ is the standard Riemannian metric on $S^2$ and $K_\gamma$ is the corresponding geodesic curvature. The interest of this problem comes from mechanics and geometry of vision. It can be formulated as a sub-Riemannian problem on the lens space L(4,1). We compute the global solution for this problem: an interesting feature is that some optimal geodesics present cusps. The cut locus is a stratification with non trivial topology.