Duality and Riemannian cubics

Riemannian cubics are curves used for interpolation in Riemannian manifolds. Applications in trajectory planning for rigid bodiy motion emphasise the group SO(3) of rotations of Euclidean 3-space. It is known that a Riemannian cubic in a Lie group G with bi-invariant Riemannian metric defines a Lie quadratic V in the Lie algebra, and satisfies a linking equation. Results of the present paper include explicit solutions of the linking equation by quadrature in terms of the Lie quadratic, when G is SO(3) or SO(1,2). In some cases we are able to give examples where the Lie quadratic is also given in closed form. A basic tool for constructing solutions is a new duality theorem. Duality is also used to study asymptotics of differential equations of the form , where β₀,β₁ are skew-symmetric 3×3 matrices, and x :ℝ→ SO(3). This is done by showing that the dual of β₀+tβ₁ is a null Lie quadratic. Then results on asymptotics of x follow from known properties of null Lie quadratics. To Charles Micchelli, with warm greetings and deep respect, on his 60th birthday Mathematics subject classifications (2000) 53A17, 53B20, 65D18, 68U05, 70E60.