Trivialisable control-affine systems revisited

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of trivial control systems, namely systems whose dynamics depends on the controls only. Trivial systems have been introduced and studied by Serres in the context of control-nonlinear systems on the plane with a scalar control. In our work, we begin by proposing an extension of the notion of triviality to control-affine systems with arbitrary number of states and controls. Next, our first result concerns two novel characterisations of trivial control-affine systems, one of them is based on the study of infinitesimal symmetries and is thus geometric. Second, we derive a normal form of trivial control-affine systems whose Lie algebra of infinitesimal symmetries possesses an almost abelian Lie subalgebra. Third, we study and propose a characterisation of trivial control-affine systems on 3-dimensional manifolds with scalar control. In particular, we complete the proof of the previous characterisation obtained by Serres. Our characterisation is based on the properties of two functional feedback invariants: the curvature (introduced by Agrachev) and the centro-affine curvature (used by Wilkens). Finally, we give several normal forms of control-affine systems, for which the curvature and the centro-affine curvature have special properties.