Section: Scientific Foundations

Small controls and conservative systems, averaging

Using averaging techniques to study small perturbations of integrable Hamiltonian systems dates back to H. Poincaré or earlier; it gives an approximation of the (slow) evolution of quantities that are preserved in the non-perturbed system. It is very subtle in the case of multiple periods but more elementary in the single period case, here it boils down to taking the average of the perturbation along each periodic orbit; see for instance [26] , [78] .

When the “perturbation” is a control, these techniques may be used after deciding how the control will depend on time and state and other quantities, for instance it may be used after applying the Pontryagin Maximum Principle as in  [30] , [31] , [40] , [49] . Without deciding the control a priori, an “average control system” may be defined as in [2] .

The focus is then on studying into details this simpler “averaged” problem, that can often be described by a Riemannian metric for quadratic costs or by a Finsler metric for costs lime minimum time.

This line of research stemmed out of applications to space engineering, see section  4.1 . For orbit transfer in the two-body problem, an important contribution was made by B. Bonnard, J.-B. Caillau and J. Gergaud  [31] in explicitly computing the solutions of the average system obtained after applying Pontryagin Maximum Principle to minimizing a quadratic integral cost; this yields an explicit calculation of the optimal control law itself. Studying the Finsler metric issued form the time-minimal case is in progress.