A note on the regularity and the existence of Riemannian splines

Abstract

In this paper, we present a comprehensive proof concerning the regularity of critical points for the spline energy functional on Riemannian manifolds, even for the general higher-order case. Although this result is widely acknowledged in the literature, a detailed proof was previously absent. Our proof relies on a generalization of the DuBois-Reymond Lemma. Furthermore, we establish the existence of minimizers for the spline energy functional in cases where multiple interpolation points are prescribed alongside just one velocity.