Lie Group Spectral Variational Integrators

Abstract: We present a new class of high-order variational integrators on Lie groups. We show that these integrators are symplectic, momentum preserving, and can be constructed to be of arbitrarily high-order, or can be made to converge geometrically. Furthermore, these methods are stable and accurate for very large time steps. We demonstrate the construction of one such variational integrator for the rigid body, and discuss how this construction could be generalized to other related Lie group problems. We close with several numerical examples which demonstrate our claims, and discuss further extensions of our work.