Lie Group Integrators for Animation and Control of Vehicles

This article is concerned with the animation and control of vehicles with complex dynamics such as helicopters, boats, and cars. Motivated by recent developments in discrete geometric mechanics, we develop a general framework for integrating the dynamics of holonomic and nonholonomic vehicles by preserving their state-space geometry and motion invariants. We demonstrate that the resulting integration schemes are superior to standard methods in numerical robustness and efficiency, and can be applied to many types of vehicles. In addition, we show how to use this framework in an optimal control setting to automatically compute accurate and realistic motions for arbitrary user-specified constraints.