Draft:Holonomic (robotics)

In control theory (which formalizes robotics) and differential topology, a path in the tangent bundle of the manifold of states is holonomic if the tangent components correspond to the derivative of the projection of the path to the manifold. More generally, the term "holonomic" can be used to describe a section of the bundle of jets of order $k>0$ that corresponds to the derivatives of order $k$ of some $k$-times differentiable map, as opposed to a section that assigns some jets that may not correspond to the derivatives of any map, which would be called "non-holonomic".

For example, if the path $c\colon [a,b]\to \mathbb {R} ^{n}\times \mathbb {R} ^{n}$ has the two components $c(t)=(x(t),v(t))$ where $x(t)$ is the state and $v(t)$ is tangent to the manifold of states (in this case, $\mathbb {R} ^{n}$), then $c$ is holonomic if $x'(t)=v(t)$ for each $t\in [a,b]$. In the same vein, an example of a path that is not holonomic is, with $n=2$, $c(t)=((t,0),(0,1))$, since $(t,0)'=(1,0)\neq (0,1)$.