Optimal trajectory planning for structure-variant mechanical systems

The planning of optimal trajectories for nonholonomic systems and of structure-variant mechanical systems are active research areas. In this report the optimal trajectories of a structure-variant mechanical systems are determined by making use of a combined direct shooting and successive unconstrained minimization method (SUMT), which performs the integrations of the dynamical system based on the timestepping scheme. A certificate of optimality is provided for the structure-variant trajectories obtained by the new optimization method