The first part of the thesis discusses an extension of Hamilton-Jacobi theory to nonholonomic mechanics with a particular interest in its application to exactly integrating the equations of motion. The major advantage of our result is that it provide...
The first part of the thesis discusses an extension of Hamilton-Jacobi theory to nonholonomic mechanics with a particular interest in its application to exactly integrating the equations of motion. The major advantage of our result is that it provides us with a method of integrating the equations of motion just as the unconstrained Hamilton---Jacobi theory does. We develop nonholonomic Hamilton-Jacobi theory from two different perspectives; one is a direct approach based on the standard formulation of nonholonomic systems, and the other uses the technique of the Chaplygin Hamiltonization. We also establish a link between these two approaches by providing an explicit formula that relates the solutions of the Hamilton-Jacobi equations resulting from both approaches.
The second part of the thesis develops a discrete analogue of Hamilton-Jacobi theory in the framework of discrete Hamiltonian mechanics. The resulting discrete Hamilton-Jacobi equation is discrete only in time, and is shown to recover the Hamilton-Jacobi equation in the continuous-time limit. The correspondence between discrete and continuous Hamiltonian mechanics naturally gives rise to a discrete analogue of Jacobi's solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. We also prove a discrete analogue of the geometric Hamilton-Jacobi theorem. These results are readily applied to the discrete optimal control setting, and some well-known results in discrete optimal control theory, such as the Gellman equation (discrete-time Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation) of dynamic programming, follow immediately. We also apply the theory to discrete linear Hamiltonian systems, and show that the discrete Riccati equation follows as a special case of the discrete Hamilton-Jacobi equation.