Rolling Symmetric Spaces

Riemannian symmetric spaces play an important role in many areas that are interrelated to information geometry. For instance, in image processing one of the most elementary tasks is image interpolation. Since a set of images may be represented by a point in the Grassmann manifold, image interpolation can be formulated as an interpolation problem on that symmetric space. It turns out that rolling motions, subject to nonholonomic constraints of no-slip and no-twist, provide efficient algorithms to generate interpolating curves on certain Riemannian manifolds, in particular on symmetric spaces. The main goal of this paper is to study rolling motions on symmetric spaces. It is shown that the natural decomposition of the Lie algebra associated to a symmetric space provides the structure of the kinematic equations that describe the rolling motion of that space upon its affine tangent space at a point. This generalizes what can be observed in all the particular cases that are known to the authors. Some of these cases illustrate the general results.