On the number of weakly Noetherian constants of motion of nonholonomic systems

Abstract

We develop a method to give an estimate on the number of functionally independent constants of motion of a nonholonomic system with symmetry which have the so called 'weakly Noetherian' property [22]. We show that this number is bounded from above by the corank of the involutive closure of a certain distribution on the constraint manifold. The effectiveness of the method is illustrated on several examples