Quasi-Chaplygin Systems and Nonholonimic Rigid Body Dynamics

Abstract

We show that the Suslov nonholonomic rigid body problem can be regarded almost everywhere as a generalized Chaplygin system. Furthermore, this provides a new example of a multidimensional nonholonomic system which can be reduced to a Hamiltonian form by means of Chaplygin reducing multiplier. Since we deal with Chaplygin systems in the local sense, the invariant manifolds of the integrable examples are not necessary tori.