The rolling ball problem on the sphere

Abstract

By a sequence of rolling motions without slipping or twisting along arcs of great circles outside the surface of a sphere of radius R, a spherical ball of unit radius has to be transferred from an initial state to an arbitrary final state taking into account the orientation of the ball. Assuming R > 1 we provide a new and shorter prove of the result of Frenkel and Garcia in [4] that with at most 4 moves we can go from a given initial state to an arbitrary final state. Important cases such as the so called elimination of the spin discrepancy are done with 3 moves only.