We are interested in knowing whether or not the motion of two smooth surfaces rolling on each other, without slip or twist, can be controlled. We present a few cases of surfaces rolling on a tangent plane where we show that controllability fails and why. The control system associated to a rolling motion defines a distribution in the configuration space. If this rolling distribution is bracket generating, local controllability is guaranteed. After deriving the kinematic equations for rolling Euclidean submanifolds of co-dimension one, we derive a condition for local controllability. |
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