Rolling Geodesics, Mechanical Systems and Elastic Curves

This paper defines a large class of differentiable manifolds that house two distinct optimal problems called affine-quadratic and rolling problem. We show remarkable connections between these two problems manifested by the associated Hamiltonians obtained by the Maximum Principle of optimal control. We also show that each of these Hamiltonians is completely intergrable, in the sense of Liouville. Finally we demonstrate the significance of these results for the theory of mechanical systems.