Moving Frames and Conservation Laws for Euclidean Invariant Lagrangians

Abstract

Noether's First Theorem yields conservation laws for Lagrangians with a variational symmetry group. The explicit formulae for the laws are well known and the symmetry group is known to act on the linear space generated by the conservation laws. In recent work the authors showed the mathematical structure behind both the Euler-Lagrange system and the set of conservation laws, in terms of the differential invariants of the group action and a moving frame. In this paper we demonstrate that the knowledge of this structure considerably eases finding the extremal curves for variational problems invariant under the special Euclidean groups SE(2) and SE(3).