Inverse problem for Chaplygin’s nonholonomic systems

Chaplygin’s nonholonomic systems are familiar mechanical systems subject to unintegrable linear constraints, which can be reduced into holonomic nonconservative systems in a subspace of the original state space. The inverse problem of the calculus of variations or Lagrangian inverse problem for such systems is analyzed by making use of a reduction of the systems into new ones with time reparametrization symmetry and a genotopic transformation related with a conformal transformation. It is evident that the Lagrangian inverse problem does not have a direct universality. By meaning of a reduction of Chaplygin’s nonholonomic systems into holonomic, regular, analytic, nonconservative, first-order systems, the systems admit a Birkhoffian representation in a star-shaped neighborhood of a regular point of their variables, which is universal due to the Cauchy-Kovalevski theorem and the converse of the Poincaré lemma.