Variational techniques

As might be expected, the general-purpose gradient-based optimization techniques of Section 14.7 can be applied to the steering of nonholonomic systems. Such methods are based on Newton iterations on the space of possible state trajectories. This leads to a gradient descent that arrives at a local optimum while satisfying the differential constraints. For details on applying such techniques to steer nonholonomic systems, see [276,334,596,901,926].