Radial kinetic nonholonomic trajectories are Riemannian geodesics!

Abstract: Nonholonomic mechanics describes the motion of systems constrained by nonintegrable constraints. One of its most remarkable properties is that the derivation of the nonholonomic equations is not variational in nature. {However, in} this paper, we prove (Theorem 1.1) that for kinetic nonholonomic {systems}, the solutions starting from a fixed point $q$ are true geodesics for a family of Riemannian metrics on the image submanifold ${\mathcal M}^{nh}_q$ of the nonholonomic exponential map. This implies a surprising result: the kinetic nonholonomic trajectories with starting point $q$, for sufficiently small times, minimize length in ${\mathcal M}^{nh}_q$!